


You Make the World Seem Bigger

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Accidental Cryptid Baby Acquisition, Angst with a Happy Ending, Friends to Co-Parents to Lovers, Getting Together, Hand Jobs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-13 23:43:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 40,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17497565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: The creature stirs. She squirm-drags herself down until she’s on Ryan’s belly, and then she noses at the pocket of his hoodie. Ryan gently tucks her in so only her head is visible, and they both watch as she sighs happily and burrows into the warmth.Ryan looks up at him, beaming. It is, Shane has to admit, very cute.“Ryan Bergara, Father of Goat-Dragons,” Shane says. “I can’t believe she already likes you best.”“Yeah, well,” Ryan says. “You tried to name her Snooki and turn her over to the state of California, so you reap what you sow.”OR:  Ryan and Shane film a Supernatural episode in the Pine Barrens on the elusive Jersey Devil. They don’t manage to find it, but a few months after filming, one definitely finds them. And it’s decided they’d make great adoptive parents.





	You Make the World Seem Bigger

**Author's Note:**

> This whole Situation stems from a flurry of discord babble on the essential premise of: what if Ryan and Shane had to co-parent a baby cryptid??? The original brainwave came from Erin/punk-rock-yuppie, and then we each picked a different cryptid and went to town with it. Any similarities between fics in the Cryptid Babies collection are down to discord mind-meld and the fact that tropes gonna trope. 
> 
> This was meant to be quite light and short, but it turns out I’ve got some dad feels. Also uh I’m not sure if y’all were aware of this but kids grow up and sometimes that’s sad. That being said: if you want to be haunted by the mental image of Ryan Bergara shirtless and wearing a baby sling with tiny hooves and tiny horns sticking out either end, this fic is for you.
> 
> Title's from Delays' "Hideaway," literally the only song I listened to while writing this fic that wasn't moody folk music.

_Prologue._

It’s gross in New Jersey in February.

Shane knew it would be, of course, but Ryan plans the trips, not him, and Ryan didn’t ask. Ryan seems to have a bit of a blind spot where winter is concerned, as if the fact that Los Angeles doesn’t experience temperatures below forty degrees means nowhere should. He’s always newly surprised by the cold.

“We’re putting the _barren_ back in Pine Barrens, baby!” Shane tells the camera, gesturing to the dense, naked trunks of cedar trees all around them. Under his feet there’s a light crunch of snow, and below that, sandy soil that only the hardiest plants could grow in. Shane loves to be outdoors, but even he has to admit it isn’t the most welcoming place.

“We’re in the woods outside the tiny community of Leeds Point, New Jersey, looking for the creature known in these parts as the Jersey Devil,” Ryan says. “Known also as the Leeds Devil—”

“Oho, that’s the name of the town,” Shane cuts in, earning himself a little glare for his cheek.

“ _Known also as the Leeds Devil_ ,” Ryan repeats, determined to get through his intro spiel, “the Jersey Devil is believed to be the cursed thirteenth child of a woman named Deborah Leeds, who lived here in the late eighteenth century.”

“Thirteen kids, that’s a lot of kids,” Shane says. “Probably tough to get your mom’s attention if you come around that late in the game. I’d act out too.”

“You’re suggesting its version of youthful rebellion was sprouting horns, disemboweling its mom, and taking off into the night to spread terror for the next two centuries?”

“Risky!” Shane says, chuckling at the look on Ryan’s face, at his eyes like dinner plates under his wool beanie. “A risky thing in the 1700s, childbirth. Eclampsia, puerperal fever…disemboweling.”

The story’s sad at the root of it, Shane thinks, once you strip all the nonsense away. A secluded rural community, viewed with suspicion by their more cosmopolitan neighbors, distrustful of outsiders. A woman with more children than any family could support, in a time before women had a choice about such things. A child born premature and deformed, before science could offer non-supernatural explanations for it. The perfect brew for a colonial monster myth.

“I don’t like it out here,” Ryan says, looking up into the treetops pensively. Snowflakes land on his cheeks and sit there for the briefest of moments before they melt. “I feel…observed. Watched.”

“You always feel watched, though,” Shane rationalizes. “Everywhere we go. That a thing for you, Ryan?”

Ryan rolls his eyes at Shane, and then Mark stops rolling to wipe moisture off the lens.

“I feel it too,” Devon says a little dreamily, wrapping her scarf around herself. “There’s an energy.”

“Oh, well if there’s an _energy_.” 

“Come on, guys, let’s get this done,” TJ interjects. “There’s more snow coming in this evening and I’d rather be holed up in a bar somewhere when it does, eating a cheeseburger as big as my own face.”

“A noble goal,” Shane agrees. “Alright, Ryan, tell me all about how the Jersey Devil’s watching you from the treetops, licking its bloody talons clean after a relaxing morning of slaughtering local livestock.”

“Blech,” Ryan says, sticking out his tongue a little and then spluttering when a big snowflake lands right in the center of it. “Okay, let’s get into it.”

As if on cue a flock of crows rises up from the treetops to their left, shifting through the air like one massive blot of black against the clouds before spiraling away into the distance. Ryan jumps half a foot in the air and gives a high-pitched squeak that Shane hopes is as funny on camera as it is in real life.

“Okay, man,” Shane says, laughing under his breath and clamping a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “You’ve gotta—it’s _birds_.”

“But what scared the birds?”

*

Almost a week after the season six Supernatural finale airs, the egg turns up on Ryan’s porch.

It’s a normal Wednesday night in early April.  Shane’s just plunked down on his couch clutching a massive club sandwich when his phone rings. When he checks the screen, Ryan’s hilarious scaredy face icon is bug-eyeing back at him.

Ryan usually texts rather than calls, which is Shane’s first clue that something’s amiss. He answers, already getting the sinking feeling that he should probably have let it go to voicemail.

“Dude, there’s an egg on my porch. Someone left an _egg_ on my _porch_ ,” Ryan says without so much as a greeting.

Ryan’s wigging out. That’s not new, except inasmuch as he rarely wigs out at Shane after work hours unless they’re on location. Usually Shane’s L.A. life between about six pm and nine am is a blissfully wig-out-free zone. 

“Is it poached? Fried? Over easy? Did someone egg your house? I need more context here.”

Shane takes a big bite of his sandwich. It’s delicious, but he can already tell he’s not going to get the chance to really enjoy it. He can already tell it will be a lost sandwich.

“It’s not a chicken egg, it’s a—a fuckin’ dinosaur egg or some shit!”

“Okay, well, it’s probably not a dinosaur egg,” Shane says around his mouthful. “What with the sixty-five million years of extinction.”

“Probably,” Ryan acknowledges, “but it’s huge. It’s not a normal egg. And it’s in a whisker basket, and there’s a note.”

“A whisker basket?”

“You know. One of those things babies come in.”

Shane _doesn’t_ know. Sometimes it’s like he and Ryan are on exactly the same wavelength, everything clicking right into place. Other times, though, it feels like they’re having completely separate conversations, running parallel but never touching. This is the latter.

“Ryan, storks don’t actually deliver babies. You do know that, right? Do you not know where babies come from? Do you need me to give you _the talk_?”

Ryan makes a bristling, angry-cat sort of noise. Shane can practically hear him trying to come up with a snappy retort and failing under the pressure of his own flustered indignance.

“Listen, can’t this wait?” Shane continues, sparing Ryan the need for a comeback in all his benevolent mercy. “Just take your egg inside and fry it or something, and then you can yell at me about it in the morning, after I’ve had a good night’s sleep and at least two cups of coffee.”

“No, man, this is…it can’t wait. The note’s addressed to both of us, and I think it’s about the finale but it’s really weird, and I’m freaking out. I’m a few minutes away from your place and I’m bringing the egg. Put some pants on.”

“You’re what? Ryan—”

But Ryan’s already hung up. He’s always been better at asking for forgiveness than permission.

Shane swears. He tosses his phone aside, crams the rest of the sandwich in his mouth, and reaches for his pants. It annoys him that Ryan had simply taken it for granted that he wasn’t wearing any. He’d been right, but _still_.

*

Five minutes later Ryan’s barreling into Shane’s apartment without knocking. Doors and other boundaries are really mere suggestions when he gets like this.

“Oh, a _wicker bassinet_ ,” Shane says, seeing the thing Ryan’s got clutched in his left hand. “Wicker, like the material it’s made of. Bassinet, like a tiny cradle.”

“Whatever, I don’t care about baby words,” Ryan says. “Look what’s inside it, dude.”

Shane peers into the bassinet. Sure enough, there’s a very large egg nestled inside. It’s about the size of an ostrich egg, but it doesn’t look like any ostrich egg he’s ever seen. It’s a mottled blackened purple color. Shane’s initial impression is that it’s a toy, or else someone’s craft project. Maybe a prop from Game of Thrones.

“I thought it would be a real egg,” he says, surprised.

“ _Touch it_ ,” Ryan says. He nods his head down at the egg.

Shane does. He reaches down and puts his hand on the egg, expecting to feel cool plastic, or maybe paper mâché. Instead the egg’s warm to the touch, as if it’s been sitting under a heat lamp. It also feels—thin, leathery. Delicate, although he can’t say how he knows it.

Ryan’s got one of his sweatshirts wrapped around it, to keep it from bouncing around on the ride over. He must have sensed the delicacy too.

“Convincing,” Shane says, frowning. “Is it mechanical? There’s something generating heat in there, maybe a battery. You said there was a note?”

Ryan thrusts a piece of paper out at him wordlessly. It’s an ordinary sheet of notebook paper, college-ruled, and the writing on it is in pen. The handwriting’s an old-fashioned flowing script, like a letter you might find in your grandmother’s hope chest, and Shane has to concentrate to read it.

Dear short scared one and tall rude one,

Thank you for your documentary on the internet about the Jersey Devil species. You presented some inaccuracies but I appreciated your thorough approach and good jokes (“bits”).

We cannot reveal ourselves to humans with cameras. I am sorry. I would have liked to give the screaming one his proof, or to “kick [the tall one] in [his] head with [my] taloned hooves,” but I would have been exiled.

I am in a bad situation and cannot care for my young at present. When I saw your documentary I knew you would help me, since you have done so much research on our kind. Please love her as you would your own young. She is precious to me.

Your biggest fan,

J. Devil

*

Shane’s first instinct is to laugh. He laughs for a solid two or three minutes, head thrown back, hand over his mouth; full, deep belly laughs like he hasn’t laughed in a long time. Then he pulls out his phone to get a picture of the egg and the note.

“What are you doing?” Ryan says, throwing out a hand to stop him.

“I’m Instagramming this from the Unsolved account. Are you kidding? Some fan’s really outdone themselves. A _documentary_ , God.”

“No, wait,” Ryan says, biting his lip in the middle where it’s already chapped. “Don’t.”

“If you’re salty that a fan referred to you as the short scared one, you need to get over it. I call you worse things than that all the time.”

“It’s not that. You’re right, it’s probably a joke, but—”

“Probably? Ryan, please tell me you don’t sincerely believe there’s even the tiniest chance that the Jersey Devil overnighted you its progeny because it likes our YouTube show.”

“Okay, fine, yes, it’s a joke. But it was hand-delivered, Shane. If it’s a prank from a fan, that means a fan has my address. Not only that, it means a fan was _on my porch_.”

Shane hadn’t thought of that. In that context, yeah, it is kind of creepy. The joke itself seems harmless enough—fake egg, fake note, a riff on the last episode—but the hand-delivery isn’t great. They’ve never had any problems with fans bothering them in person, besides the occasional request for a picture while out and about, but they’ve both heard the horror stories.

“So you want to, what, call the cops?”

“No, I don’t want to call the cops, they didn’t do anything _illegal_ ,” Ryan says. “I’d just rather not make it seem like the way to get featured on the Unsolved Instagram is to turn up outside my house with props.”

“Yeah, that’s fair.”

Shane touches the egg again. It’s radiating heat. He can’t believe a fan was able to come up with this in under a week.

“Doesn’t it seem kind of real, though?” Ryan asks, hesitant. He darts a glance up to Shane, as if he doesn’t want to risk full eye-contact for fear Shane will give him shit for being a gullible idiot. Which he _is_. “Like, I know it can’t be real,” he hurries with the caveat, “but I can’t figure out what it actually is.”

Shane’s no craftsman and he’s no artist. Stuff like this, that people make with their hands, might as well be magic to him. He still thinks there must be a battery or heat source inside, encased in something like painted porcelain. It’s too bad they can’t feature it, really; it’s beautiful in its own way, the darkest purple speckled with black and silver and other colors he can’t quite name even though his eye perceives them.

And it’s _so_ funny.

“It’s well-done, especially considering how fast they did it,” he acknowledges. “And the part in the letter about all your rigorous research on the species? Hilarious. Ryan Bergara, noted cryptozoologist, who sometimes spends as many as five hours scouring the internet for unsourced second-hand accounts of supernatural happenings before sending it off to Research. So are we gonna bust this bad boy open or what?”

“No!” Ryan says, almost a yelp, and then he winces visibly at his own lack of chill. “I was hoping we could keep it here at your place for a while just to, you know. Just to see. I’d keep it at mine, but my roommates would get drunk and try to play street hockey with it.”

“Ryan, it’s a prank. Bologna. It’s a big fat load of nothing.”

“Yeah, but…” Ryan shrugs. He looks confused, like even _he_ doesn’t know why he’s making such a big deal out of this. “I don’t know, man. I’ve got a feeling.”

Shane can tell he’s on the verge of a _please,_ which is a level of earnestness he doesn’t often get from Ryan. Ryan doesn’t ask him for much, really. He lets Shane be as much of an asshole on-camera as he wants, because it’s good for the show and they both know it, and off-camera he rarely needs something from Shane that Shane wouldn’t freely do for a friend anyway.

This is toeing at that line a little bit. Babysitting a fake egg from a fan on the extreme off-chance that it might be a _real_ egg from a _cryptid_ fan is objectively a strange request.

But Ryan’s got this look on his face that he rarely aims at Shane: sincere, serious, nary a toothy smile in sight. When his eyes finally drift up from the egg to meet Shane’s, there’s an uncomfortable desperation there that Shane was not expecting. It’s ridiculous, but Ryan feels strongly about this. Strongly enough to ask Shane to make an exception to his “no bullshit off-camera” rule and take temporary custody of this not-egg egg.

Ryan opens his mouth to add the _please_ , but Shane doesn’t let him get it out. Ryan’s embarrassed himself enough for one day.

“Yeah, fine. Obi might try to fuck with it, but I’ll leave it in its little bed and hope for the best.”

Ryan passes his hand across his jaw, and his relief is palpable. Shane’s worried he’s going to get, like, _demonstrative_ about it, but in the end Ryan settles for gently nudging Shane on the forearm with his fist.

“Thanks,” he says. “That’s, uh. I know it’s stupid, but I…thanks.” Then he snorts. “Tall rude one. Jesus.”

“I do feel called out,” Shane admits.

*

After Ryan leaves, Shane performs a quick systematic check of the egg. It’s heavy, but not heavy enough to be concealing any complex machinery. When he holds it to his ear he expects to hear ticking or whirring, some kind of mechanical noise, but he doesn’t hear anything. It smells strangely fragrant; dank and mossy, with a hint of pine.

He tucks it back in its bassinet, sticks the bassinet on a table in the corner of his living room, and forgets about it. For a full week the egg sits untouched and ignored.

One night he comes home from work and he can’t find his cat. Shane searches for Obi in all of his usual favorite hiding spots. He even opens a can of tuna, but no luck. Shane’s just starting to worry that Obi might have snuck out when he was leaving for work this morning when he happens to look over at the bassinet.

Obi’s curled protectively around the egg, tucked all the way around it like a little kitty croissant. He’s got his chin resting on the slightly narrower end, and when Shane approaches he gives a sleepy _mrow?_ and stretches his toes apart against the shell.

“Hey buddy,” Shane says, scratching Obi between the ears. “You gave me a scare. What are you doing in here?”

Obi nudges even closer against the egg, purring up a storm, and that’s when Shane realizes the egg is still giving off heat. No wonder Obi’s all about it. He’s pretty sure it’s even warmer than it was last week. Whatever’s in that egg, there’s no way it should still be producing that kind of heat for this long without a power source. Shane hopes it isn’t a fire hazard.

He takes a picture of Obi hugging the egg and sends it to Ryan.

 **Ryan** : p cute. hey orange boi!

 **Shane** : It’s still crazy warm, is the thing. He likes it because it’s a space heater.

 **Ryan:** ?? is that even possible?

 **Ryan** : oh shit what if it’s a bomb

 **Ryan** : if you blow up because i made your cat incubate an egg bomb i’ll never forgive myself

 **Ryan** : shane??? are you blown up?

 **Ryan** : answer me

 **Ryan** : shane

 **Ryan** : SHANE THIS ISNT FUNNY

 **Ryan** : im coming over, please don’t be exploded

*

Shane is not exploded. He’s simply a little preoccupied at the moment.

He’s about to text Ryan back, to reassure Ryan that the egg is not a bomb, when something moves out of the corner of his eye.

It’s Obi, skittering out of the bassinet and out of the room like someone clapped next to his ear. He’s a cat, and cats do weird shit all the time, so Shane’s not that phased. One time Obi fled like he was about to be murdered just because Shane stood up from the couch too quickly and had the audacity to be tall.

But then there’s another shiver of movement from the bassinet, so slight it could almost be nothing. So slight Shane might have imagined it. A tiny nothing of a wobble.

Shane blinks.

He must have imagined it. Obviously the egg didn’t move. Obviously it didn’t twitch of its own accord.

_Obviously the egg is not a bomb._

Shane takes a cautious step forward to examine the egg a little closer, and then it rolls all the way from the far end of the bassinet to the near end. He freezes, startled by the extremity of the movement.

“Um,” he says out loud.

Shane watches, transfixed, as a tiny hairline crack appears along the length of the egg.

“ _Um_.”  He looks around, but there’s no one else there to see what he’s seeing, nobody there to verify that he’s not hallucinating or having some kind of egg-related nervous breakdown. Shane likes living alone, but it’s moments like this, when the chips are down and a mystery monster is hatching in your living room and the only thing there to bear witness is your pet cat, when you wish you had a roommate.

He sits down heavily on the edge of the couch, because his legs won’t hold him up any more. He sits down and he watches the little crack turn in to several cracks, spidering along the surface of the egg. There’s something oozing from the cracks, something wet and slippery like mucus membrane. It’s very clearly biological.

He texts Ryan back.

 **Shane** : Dude, I think our Hatchimal is done baking.

 **Ryan** : im 20 mins away

 **Shane** : Don’t run red lights or anything, but

 **Shane** : Please hurry.

Maybe it makes him the fearful one for once, but Shane doesn’t want to do whatever _this_ is alone. He doesn’t want to be alone in his apartment when whatever’s making its way out of that egg finally emerges. He needs for Ryan to be here with him.

He needs for the thing to _wait_.

Ryan will know what to do. He’ll be panicky and overwhelmed, Shane knows, but some part of Ryan has been expecting this outcome all along, even if he was too embarrassed to admit it. He will not also be confronted with a fundamental shift in his entire world view, as Shane is now.

“Okay, dude,” Shane tells the egg sternly. It’s wobbling continuously now, the cracks deepening. “You’ve gotta, like. You’ve got to stop. Just for—just for a few minutes. I let you live rent-free in my apartment for a week, so you need to cool it as a personal favor to me.”

The egg stops wobbling, as if it can hear him. As if it can _understand_ him.

Shane takes a deep breath.

*

Maybe twelve minutes later—Ryan must have sped like crazy—there’s a loud pounding on Shane’s door. He’s up like a shot to open it, relief flooding through his body. The tips of his fingers are numb with adrenaline and he flexes the fingers of his left hand as he pulls open the door with his right.

Ryan’s on his stoop, restless and stunned, already pacing in the five seconds it took Shane to get to the door.

“Did I miss it?” he asks.

“No,” Shane says. “I don’t even know what _it_ is. Something’s hatching, but it could be anything. It could be a weird emu. A cassowary.”

“Yeah, it could be,” Ryan says, and he pushes in when Shane steps aside. “But it isn’t.”

Together they hover over the bassinet, watching the egg crack open. Ryan needn’t have rushed; it takes a long time, crack by tiny crack, for any real progress to be made. They kneel for an hour, more, in silence, watching the thing in the egg become the thing _out_ of the egg.

Finally, a tiny something pushes through. The smallest little cloven hoof.

Ryan exhales.

“This is like that scene in Jurassic Park,” he says. “Where they’re—where they’re in the lab where the dinosaur eggs are incubated and one starts hatching in front of them.”

“And they’re like, _c’mon, little guy! Push! Push!_ And it’s all cute and yowly, which is ironic because the audience knows it wants to eat them?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. If he’s now considering whether the thing in the egg might want to eat them, as Shane is, he doesn’t say so. He goes quiet again. And then: “I’m really glad you didn’t get blown up. I was…”

He doesn’t have to say it. Shane knows he was scared. Ryan’s had his hands in the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie this whole time, to hide the shaking.

“Things with hooves are mammals, Ryan,” Shane says, letting Ryan off the hook. He can’t help putting voice to what’s bothering him the most. “And mammals aren’t…they don’t hatch out of eggs. That’s not right.”

“Platypuses,” Ryan says.

“What?”

“Platypuses. Platypi? Whatever. They’re mammals and they hatch from eggs, right? So it isn’t impossible.”

Shane supposes that’s true, and it does strangely make him feel better. Weird shit exists in in the world; anomalies happen. Something can fail to fit into the usual categories and still be flesh and blood and bone. A creature can be remarkable and still be natural. It might be an in-between thing, caught at a strange moment in its evolution.

Bit by bit, the creature emerges. It takes a long time. If this were a bird or an alligator, some familiar animal, Shane would be tempted to help it along, to pull bits of shell out of its way to broaden its path into the world. He holds himself back.

Instead he watches Ryan watch the thing hatch. Ryan’s on his knees at the side of the bassinet, hands still shoved in his hoodie, head so low that Shane can only see from his nose up over the side. He’s plainly hovering right at the sweet spot between thrilled and terrified, torn between watching the egg like a hawk and sneaking glances at Shane for reassurance.

“I want to remind you that I’ve been sort of on board with cryptids this whole time,” Shane says, because it needs to be said. “My position all along has been that anything natural is a lot more likely to exist than a ghost. This isn’t—this doesn’t mean…”

Ryan takes a break from staring at the egg to stare over at Shane, incredulous.

“Jesus, Shane, is now the time to be arguing about who’s right? Just shut up and enjoy the miracle of life, dude. I’ll rub it in later, count on it.”

“I know. I just…”

Shane doesn’t have words to express how very out-of-sorts he feels, how everything in the world seems to be coming at him slightly at an angle. Everything in his apartment looks somehow different, with the egg hatching inside it. Even Ryan looks different, patient and still the way he never is. Looking at him is almost as disconcerting as looking at the egg.

And then, with a crack and slithering noise and a gush of liquid, one whole side of the egg gives way and the creature falls out of it, onto its side.

Shane jumps back just as Ryan leans in for a closer look.

It surprises Shane how brave Ryan is in the face of the real thing, compared to how frantic with fear he had been at the _threat_ of the thing when they filmed on location in the Pine Barrens two months ago. He’d been a nervous wreck for the whole shoot, but now that an actual being has manifested, fascination has won the day.

The creature is—Shane can’t even describe it. It’s like nothing he’s ever seen, and yet it’s like at least five animals he’s seen a million times. Piece by piece he sees something he recognizes as an animal, but taken as a whole it’s so strange his eyes can barely focus on it.

It’s small—six inches long, maybe eight—and black or grey. Its body is lightly furred, although it’s hard to tell because it’s damp all over from the egg’s other contents. It has hooves. It has horns.

It’s shivering like crazy, shivering and shivering in the bassinet, and then it pulls free of the rest of the egg and unfurls its _wings_ : grey webbed wings with a span as long as its body. Not like a bird; like a bat.

“Like a thestral,” Ryan breathes.

Ryan reaches out and pushes the discarded egg out of the way. Then he cautiously picks a bit of shell off the creature’s face. It turns toward the movement, its eyes closed, and butts its blunt nose against the side of Ryan’s hand.

“Its nose is burning up,” Ryan says. “The egg was hot because _it’s_ hot.”

“Yeah, but what is it?” Shane asks. It’s the first thing he’s said since the creature hatched, and he’s shocked by how it reacts. It starts to drag itself toward Shane’s side of the bassinet by the joints of its wings, letting out a quiet, desperate-sounding bleat as it tries to get to Shane.

Ryan watches, awed, and then his eyes go even wider. “Oh shit, dude, it knows you. It recognizes your voice.”

“Impossible,” Shane says. “I’m not even singing that new Ariana Grande song right now. That and yelling at Obi to get off the counter are all it will have heard in the last week at Casa Madej.”

Shane still doesn’t understand what the thing is. He doesn’t understand _how_ the thing is. But regardless of the answers to those questions, it is undeniably a living, breathing creature right here in his living room. It’s wet and cold and vulnerable, and he distracts himself from the larger existential questions by making a list in his head of all the things it will need.

A washcloth, to wipe it clean. Blankets, for a nest. Does it sleep in a nest? Does it sleep at all? Shane doesn’t know. Food, eventually, and water, and Shane’s not sure how to even start determining what it eats, other than grabbing a bunch of stuff out of the fridge and letting it pick.

If it is in fact a Jersey Devil—one of the species _j. diabolus,_ which is what Shane would call it for taxonomic purposes if he had control over such things—there’s a not-insignificant chance it eats something Shane can’t easily procure for it. Like raw horse meat, or human souls. So that might be a problem.

“Okay, Ryan,” he says, standing up and snapping his fingers to pull Ryan’s attention momentarily away from the thing. “Stay here with…with it. I’m going to grab some stuff I think we might need, and my laptop so you can pull up your research notes from the finale.

It feels good to have a job to do, something solid for his brain to latch on to.

He comes back with some old towels and things, a tiny ramekin of vegetable stock, a second one with chicken broth, and a third with milk, all on a tray. He digs an eyedropper out of his medicine cabinet, in case the creature isn’t capable of feeding itself yet. He feels like a Civil War nurse.

When he sits down carefully with the tray, he sees that Ryan’s got his hand back in the bassinet again. He’s stroking the creature on the head with his pointer finger, lightly petting the fur between its tiny horns.

Shane already knows, from the entranced look on Ryan’s face, that Ryan will want to keep it. Shane was going to suggest they call the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for some professional help—and he still will, he has to—but he can see that Ryan will fight him every step of the way.

He hands the washcloth to Ryan, to wipe the creature as clean as he can and then dry it with one of the towels.

“I brought, um,” Shane indicates the ramekins. “To see what it eats. Something this little probably needs to be fed small amounts frequently, so.”

He hands out the eyedropper to Ryan, but Ryan doesn’t take it.

“You do it, man,” Ryan says. “I want—you haven’t even touched it.”

Shane can see what he’s doing. Ryan is many things, most of them good, but subtle isn’t among them. Ryan knows that if Shane bonds with the creature, if he feeds it with his own hands, he’ll start to get attached the way Ryan is attached already. They’ll be truly in it together, then.

Ryan gives him a beseeching look, and Shane opens his mouth to say _no, Ryan, I’m not going to bond with our demon goat-bat baby._

Instead he picks up the eyedropper, fills it to the brim with vegetable stock, and lifts it to the creature’s nose to let it sniff. Its eyes still aren’t open but it smells its way to the opening of the dropper, pushes its mouth right up on it so Shane can stick the dropper in and feed it bit by bit. He can feel the heat radiating off the creature, warming his hand.

It drinks three eyedroppers’ worth of broth and then it seems to be done, because it puts its head down and gives another full-body tremor.

“I think it’s cold,” Ryan says. “It must—the egg must’ve held the heat in really well, and now…”

“Right,” Shane agrees. He starts to wrap towels around the thing, tightly enough that it will be insulated, until the bassinet is filled to the sides. Ryan’s right there with him, fussing over the towel placement, tucking it up under and around the creature’s body like he’s tucking in a child for bed. 

“You wanna read it a bedtime story, man?” Shane asks, and gets a glare for his trouble. “Maybe sing it a lullaby?”

“Fuck off, it’s working,” Ryan points out. He nods his head into the bassinet, where the creature is curled up tight, wings wrapped around itself inside its cocoon of blankets. It’s no longer shivering, and its breathing evens out as it falls asleep.

Shane’s just relieved it sleeps at all.

Without talking about it, he and Ryan lie down on the floor on their stomachs next to the bassinet with Shane’s laptop in front of them. Ryan starts scrolling through all his research notes for the Jersey Devil episode, muttering to himself and highlighting entire paragraphs.

Shane falls asleep like that, with Ryan’s soft muttering in his ear.

*

Shane wakes up perhaps four hours later, a painful crick in his neck from sleeping on the living room floor with no pillow. Ryan’s asleep next to him on the floor, curled up small. They didn’t even turn the lights off.

For a moment he’s not sure what’s woken him—maybe the neck pain, maybe the light—and then he hears a croaking noise from the bassinet. It’s awake again and probably hungry, assuming it’s like every other baby thing on the planet.

Half-asleep, Shane sits up in a daze and reaches for the vegetable stock and the eyedropper.

“Hey, little dude,” he whispers into the bassinet. “Are you hungry? I don’t know what to call you.”

The thing looks up at him. It _looks up_. Its eyes are already open.

Shane doesn’t know what he was expecting. Blood-red eyes, maybe, sparking with evil, reflecting hellfire. Or dark wells of nothing, like a bat’s unseeing eyes. Certainly not this.

Its eyes are a lovely warm honey-golden color. Its pupils are horizontal, like a goat’s or a horse’s, and its eyes are framed by thick pale eyelashes. Just like a goat, really, except there’s already a flicker of intelligence and recognition there that you wouldn’t see in livestock. It watches him steadily, trustingly, almost _humanly_.

“Okay, let’s eat, buddy,” Shane says. He doesn’t know why he’s talking to it. Surely it doesn’t understand him yet, if it ever will, but it turns its face up to him nonetheless, tracking his voice. “Open up for the choo-choo, I guess.” 

It eats five eyedroppers’ worth of broth this time, before it lays its head back down with a tiny contented sigh.

Shane doesn’t know what to do. Should he go to bed? Sleep on the couch? He kneels by the bassinet for a moment, unsure. Then he looks over and notices Ryan looking up at him from the floor, blinking confusedly into the light.

“Hey, big guy,” he says. “Is it morning?”

“No, not yet,” Shane says. “Go back to sleep.”

“’Kay,” Ryan agrees, pushing his forehead into the crook of his elbow like a makeshift pillow. “You too.”

“Yeah, I’m coming,” Shane says. “I just had to feed the…thing.”

“Thanks,” Ryan says quietly, his mouth turning up at the corners into a sleepy smile.

Shane grabs two throw pillows and a blanket from the couch. He nudges one pillow at the side of Ryan’s head until Ryan lifts his neck to let Shane slip it under, and then he tosses the other a foot to Ryan’s left. He hits the overhead light and lies back down on the floor, pulling the blanket over them both.

Ryan murmurs a little, almost back to sleep already. He shuffles closer, under the blanket.

*

They both call in sick on Friday morning. It’s suspicious, but Shane has to hope people will think they’ve caught the same bug instead of assume that they’re blowing off work to go to Disneyland together. There’s precedent for both.

Ryan feeds the—Shane almost thinks _the baby_ before he forcibly bats it down—while Shane makes them breakfast and feeds Obi.

By the bright, natural light of day, it’s easier to see how the creature in Shane’s living room is connected to the creature or creatures known in the Pine Barrens area as the Jersey Devil. They’d spent some time the night before picking through the confusing descriptions of sightings, trying to make the pieces fit, and Shane can see how it all comes together now.

“No wonder nobody can decide on what it looks like,” Shane says, setting his coffee mug down and watching with scientific curiously as Ryan eyedroppers stock into its mouth. “It looks like all of the things.”

During the filming of the episode, Shane had taken the many contrasting descriptions of the Jersey Devil as evidence to suggest people were making up the sightings. Now, looking at the creature in front of him, he realizes he couldn’t describe it accurately either, if he was asked to do so. Not if he was seeing it quickly, or in poor lighting. Not in words anybody could make sense of.

At first his eyes say: the tiniest goat. It’s got hooves like a goat, fur like a goat, and its face is thoroughly goatlike from snout to the tips of its ears.

Then it twitches, unfurl its wings as it settles into its feeding, and Shane’s eyes say: bat. Flexible membraned wings, which will clearly be dexterous when the creature’s old enough to control them. If dragons were real, he might say dragon.

And then after it feeds it stretches out on its back like a satisfied cat, and Shane sees its small, spindly arms close to its chest and thinks: kangaroo? Something bipedal, anyway, with strong legs and weak arms. When it learns to walk, it’ll probably be on two legs and not four.

Finally it tucks its whip-thin, diamond-tipped prehensile tail up against its body protectively, and Shane thinks: _devil_.

It’s so messily straddling scientific classes—part mammal, part reptile, hatched like a bird. Part monstrous other. Shane’s reminded of the Four Corners, that spot where you can go and put one leg in Arizona, the second in New Mexico, one arm in Utah, and the second in Colorado, and technically be in all four states at the same time. The creature is _that_.

Ryan shakes his head. “It looks like I imagined it would look,” he says. His voice is still scratchy from sleep. He’s still wearing the clothes he slept in last night. “It looks like the drawings. I didn’t think it could, because the drawings are insane. It never occurred to me that it could be a whole species.”

“What are we going to do, man?” Shane asks softly. He’s put it off as long as he could, but they have to start coming up with a plan. Shane needs to decide what to _do_. “I can’t—I can’t take care of it in my living room. We don’t know what it eats. We don’t know how big it’ll get, or how quickly. We don’t know if it’ll be loud, and I live in an _apartment_. We have to—Ryan, we have to call a professional. You know that, right?”

 _I can’t do this_ _alone_ , he thinks. _Please don’t make me do this._

Ryan frowns, pulling his hoodie around himself. He thinks for a long moment, much stiller than he usually is. “Shane, you’re not wrong, but I think maybe we _are_ the professionals. You read the letter.”

Shane’s been very deliberately not thinking about the letter. He’s been trying to think of the creature as an animal, of animal intelligence, more like a pet than a human. But that letter was written in English, in a neat hand, with better grammar than over half the people Shane knows. Whoever or whatever penned it, they possess human intelligence. At least.

“Ryan, we make a YouTube show about ghost-hunting, we’re not experts. The Department of Fish and Wildlife might—” he starts, beseeching, but Ryan’s already shaking his head.

“They’d. No, Shane, they’d test it. They’d tear it apart trying to figure out what it is. And that’s not even to start on what they might do to us. Best case scenario they’d accuse us of a hoax, and then the show would be done.”

Shane knows that Ryan is right. He knows because his scientific impulses are all screaming at him, _find out what it is. Find out what it does. Find out how it works._ There’s no way actual scientists would be able to resist, even if their intentions were good—and Shane is too cynical to necessarily believe that the government’s intentions are good.

That would be bad enough, if the creature’s just an animal. But if it’s more than that, if it processes things complexly, if cognitively it’s more person than not, Shane could never stomach it.

“God damn it,” he says. He wants to kick something, but he knows the reaction would bother Ryan and he’s already worried about upsetting the thing in the bassinet. “Ryan, I’m not, I don’t want. I’m not ready for…”

He’s thinking ‘fatherhood,’ but of course he can’t say that on account of how it sounds _bonkers_ , so he trails off rather than complete the thought. He didn’t need to say it, though, because Ryan’s expression is knowing.

“Yeah, well. They say nobody’s ever really ready, right?” Ryan says, and Shane lets out a shaky laugh. The truth is that Ryan does seem kind of ready. He’s got that look on his face, nervous but eager, terrified but joyous. That new parent look. “Shane. Please.”

There it is again, _please_. Ryan must know what a weapon it can be, used so judiciously. Shane opens his mouth again to say _no, absolutely not_ , but he can’t quite make himself. Not when Ryan is holding himself so still, looking at him like that. Not when the creature in the bassinet is making sweet snuffling noises.

“Jesus, stop looking at me like that. Fine, we’ll try. But half the time we can’t even remember our flashlights on shoots. I don’t know how you expect us to manage _this_.”

Ryan considers this. He bites his lip again, and Shane can’t tell if he’s concealing a smile or just caught up in trying to solve this problem. It might be a little of both.

“We will, because we don’t have a choice. I’ll come stay here for a while,” Ryan says eventually. “If that’s, uh, if that’s okay. I’ll go get my stuff now, while my roommates are at work.”

And that’s…sure. That’s fine. Shane can’t do it alone. Surely Ryan’s roommates will eventually notice he’s semi-moved out and the questions will come, but that’s Ryan’s problem. They’ve got enough to deal with at the moment as it is.

“Okay. What do we do with it?”

“Put it in the office,” Ryan suggests. “I’ll sleep in the recliner in there. The bassinet works for now. If it outgrows it we’ll probably need a crib or something with walls, but—”

“Ryan, it’s got _wings_. I don’t think it’s going to respect a baby gate.”

“And we’ve gotta name it,” Ryan says, ignoring him. “I can’t keep calling it _it_ all the time. It’s, like, dehumanizing.”   

“It’s not a human!”

Honestly, Shane might as well not be speaking at all, that’s how much Ryan’s listening to him. It’s increasingly becoming evident that, in a mysterious reversal of roles, Shane has spent the last twelve hours mostly panicking and Ryan has spent it mostly _planning_. He’s pretending to be coming up with it on the fly, but Shane can tell he’s been putting together the framework of this plan since the creature poked its hoof out of that egg. Maybe even before that: maybe since the egg turned up on his doorstop.

Shane has been, as they say, snookered.

*

Ryan comes back around lunchtime with a big suitcase full of his stuff, clothes and shoes and toiletries and electronics, and his pillow tucked under his arm. Shane’s wondering how long Ryan’s anticipating this arrangement lasting, because it sure looks like he’s brought half the shit he owns.

They spend the afternoon bickering over the creature’s name.

“Vinny,” Shane suggests. “Pauly. Ronnie.”

“You think it’s a boy?”

“Yes, Ryan, because I know all about the sex characteristics of the Jersey Devil species,” Shane snaps. “Of course I don’t think it’s a boy, I think it’s a _creature_. What about Sammi?”

“All those names are stupid,” Ryan says. “Why do you like names ending in the ‘ee’ sound so much?’”

“Okay, then. Snooki.”

Ryan purses his lips, looking put-upon. He pinches the bridge of his nose, as if he might be getting a headache. “Shane, are you just suggesting names of cast members from Jersey Shore?”

“Well it is a, you know. A Jersey Devil.”

Shane’s pretty proud of himself for that one, actually, and the look of slow-dawning horror on Ryan’s face makes it worth it.  

“We’re not naming our—our _whatever_ after _Snooki_ ,” Ryan insists. “The Pine Barrens are a whole ‘nother place. You know, you were there!”

“The Situation would be a great name for a Jersey Devil, though,” Shane says. “Our little Situation.”

The creature lets out a soft but sharp bleat, which does sound to Shane like a veto.

“I don’t see any, you know, _bits_ ,” Ryan says. He’s lying on his back on Shane’s couch, looking down at the creature curled up on his chest. “Goats have dicks, kangaroos have dicks. Do dragons have dicks?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Ryan. Let me Google _do dragons have dicks_ real quick and find out.”

“Better turn safe search on,” Ryan says, snickering and then cutting himself off abruptly when the creature shifts in its sleep. “Or else you’re not gonna like those search results.”

“Maybe I will like ‘em,” Shane says, to be combative. “Maybe I Google dragon dicks all the time and you just never knew about it before. Maybe I’ve got a whole stash of dragon dicks hidden in my closet and when you open the door they’ll come tumbling down on your face in slow motion.”

“Also the note said ‘she’.” Ryan breezes right on by, refusing to dignify that unlikely pronouncement with a response. “So I vote female. Not that the Jersey Devil species has gender identity, necessarily. I wouldn’t want to put, like, our weird human bullshit on her.”  

“You’re turning out to be a much more progressive parent than I would have assumed.” If he’d been asked to predict it, Shane would have thought Ryan would be halfway to painting the office pink by now, not spending whole minutes mulling over the precarious and unknowable personal identity of cryptids.

“What about JD?” Ryan asks, stroking the creature along its spine with one finger.

“Like Salinger?”

“Do I strike you as a big _Catcher in the Rye_ fan, Shane?”

Shane’s about to open his mouth to crack a joke about how that would require Ryan to have read it, or any of the other books Ryan was assigned in high school and doubtless blew off to play Madden on his Xbox instead, but something stops him. He’s strangely aware of not wanting to undermine Ryan in front of the creature.

His life’s about to get a lot more difficult in ways he wasn’t expecting, if he can’t even make fun of Ryan in front of her. That’s Shane’s bread and butter. He’s almost not sure how to talk to Ryan without it.

“Right. Like Scrubs, then?”

“Shane, do I strike you as a big _Zach Braff fan_?” Ryan asks, appalled. “Come on. No, like. Short for Jersey Devil. JD.”

Shane likes that. It’s direct, it’s to-the-point, it’s gender-neutral. He tests it out. “JD, don’t you talk back to your father like that! JD, stop trying to eat Obi’s poop out of the litter box!”

Ryan cracks a wide smile, but he’s careful not to laugh again and disrupt the sleeping creature. “See, it’s good, right?”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees. “It’s good.”

The creature—JD—stirs. She’s only a day old and she can’t maneuver herself along, but she can sort of squirm, and that’s what she does. She squirm-drags herself down until she’s on Ryan’s belly, and then she noses at the pocket of his hoodie.

“I think she wants in,” Shane says. Ryan gently tucks her into the pocket of his hoodie, so only her head  is visible. They both watch as she sighs happily and burrows into the warmth.

Ryan looks up at him, beaming. It is, Shane has to admit, very cute.

“Ryan Bergara, Father of Goat-Dragons,” Shane says. “I can’t believe she already likes you best.”

“Yeah, well,” Ryan says. “You tried to name her Snooki and turn her over to the state of California, so you reap what you sow.”

“That’s fair,” Shane agrees. Ryan still looks entirely too pleased with himself.

“Sleep well, little nugget,” he whispers, putting a protective hand over the lump. And then, to Shane, more of a hiss than a whisper: “Don’t think I’m going to forget how many Jersey Shore cast members you could name off the top of your head. I’m choosing to ignore it for now, but I do have follow-up q’s.”

“Ask away, I’m unburdened by shame, baby. And for the record, you _do_ seem like a Zach Braff fan.”

“Low blow,” Ryan says with a quiet whistle.

*

Ryan had made a lot of promises, going into this. “I’ll handle all the nighttime feedings,” he’d said. “JD probably won’t even be that loud,” he’d said. “She’s just a tiny thing,” he’d said.

Lies. All of them lies.

It goes pretty smoothly at first. Ryan gets special permission from BuzzFeed to work from home for a while, citing a family emergency; they’re fortunately between seasons of the show, so he’d only be researching and writing anyway. It’ll buy them time to come up with a new plan.

JD _is_ quiet, to start. For the first few days all she does is sleep, bleat, eat from the eyedropper every few hours, and snuffle around. Ryan sets up camp in Shane’s office, which has been transformed into a temporary nursery, and true to his word he takes responsibility for the overnight feedings.

The problem is that JD grows. She grows quickly.

By Monday, Shane’s got to swing by Target on the way home from work to pick up some baby bottles because she’s out-eating the eyedropper. They’ve got her on a diet of milk and vegetable stock, and to his and Ryan’s shared relief she’s shown no interest in any meat-based broth. Shane figures that means she probably won’t grow up to eat Obi and then develop a taste for cats, like Alf. It also means she probably won’t eat _them_ , which is a trait Shane values highly in adopted cryptid daughters.

By Wednesday, she’s got _lungs_. She very cleverly puts them to use in the middle of the night, like any self-respecting infant.

Shane jolts awake when he hears the wail. It sounds exactly, terrifyingly like a human baby, and for a minute he thinks there’s an actual child losing its shit in his apartment. Then he remembers videos he’s seen of young goats screaming, their noises shockingly human-sounding, shockingly insistent.

He runs into the office and Ryan’s pacing back and forth clutching JD, wrapped in a blanket, to his bare chest. She’s nearly the size of Obi already, easily twice her birth weight in a week.

“I’m sorry!” he says, when he sees Shane. His eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed and exhausted. “I’m sorry, she won’t, she won’t stop, I don’t know what’s wrong. I fed her, but…”

“At least she sounds like a real baby, and not something harder to explain,” Shane says. She’s so loud, Shane’s sure his neighbors will hear.

She wails again, and Ryan flinches and clutches her closer to his chest. “Hey, shh, shh, it’s okay, you’re okay!”

Shane takes a closer look at Ryan. It’s immediately apparent that he’s just about at the end of his rope.

“Hey, man,” Shane says, approaching cautiously, holding out his hands for the little bundle in Ryan’s arms. Ryan looks up at him, panicky and frantic, as if he might spook and shy away from Shane’s hands, and Shane puts them up in the universal gesture of _I mean you no harm_. “Have you slept at all tonight?”

Ryan laughs humorlessly. “She hasn’t slept, so I haven’t slept.”

Shane carefully eases the bundle out of Ryan’s arms. “You’re a mess, dude. Go lie down in my bed and get a little sleep,” he orders. “I’ll—I’ve got this for a while.”

“Really?” Ryan asks. He looks dubious, but also like he needs the sleep desperately. It’s true that Shane hasn’t been the most hands-on with her, but that’s mostly because Ryan’s had it under control, not because Shane _can’t_.

“Yes, really. You’re asleep on your feet anyway. Put earbuds in so you can’t hear her crying.”

Ryan’s hand is warm on his shoulder. He starts to lean into Shane for a moment, like a half-hug, and then he freezes and pulls back, confused.

“Right, okay. Thanks,” he says, shaking his head, disappearing from the room before Shane can change his mind.

“That was weird,” Shane tells JD. “Your d—uh, Ryan is a weird dude. He was trying to keep you all to himself, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he? That scoundrel.”

He realizes that he’s talking baby-talk to her in a lilting, sing-song tone, and that’s embarrassing. Then he realizes that it’s _working_. She’s not crying any more.

“Oh, you just wanted some intelligent conversation, huh?” he asks her. She blinks up at him through those feathery eyelashes and nudges her horns against his upper arm. “So demanding. Okay, well, let me tell you the story about a holographic ear of corn named Maizey and her good friend Gene, who is French fries. It’s a whole thing, you’ll love it.”

JD yawns. Shane chooses to take it as a compliment.

“That’s right, hon,” he agrees, sitting down in the recliner to rock her the rest of the way to sleep. “It _is_ critically-acclaimed. Thank you for noticing.”

Shane wakes up abruptly a few hours later, sun pouring in through the blinds. He panics for a moment, wondering where JD is, and then he realizes she’s still curled up in his arms asleep. She’ll be awake soon, ready to be fed, but if he doesn’t move he can get a few more minutes of quiet.

There’s a heavy weight on his legs, and when he looks down, he sees Obi settled on his lap.

“Hey buddy,” Shane says softly, reaching down to scratch Obi under the chin. “How are you doing? Feeling a little neglected lately?”

“Yes, thanks for noticing,” comes Ryan’s voice. “You never ask me, _honey, how was your day?_ You never tell me I’m pretty anymore. Ever since the baby, the romance is dead.”

Shane only doesn’t jump a mile in the air because he’s got precious cargo on board.

“Jesus Christ, dude!”

Ryan’s peering over at him from Shane’s desk chair. He’s sitting in it cross-legged, and he’s got a funny look on his face. Shane considers himself something of an expert on Ryan Bergara micro-expressions by now and he doesn’t recognize it at all. Ryan spins around in the chair, one full rotation, and when Shane can see his face again it’s fallen into a normal grin.

“Sorry.”

“Were you sitting there watching me sleep?”

“I came in to wake you up for work, but you all were so cozy that I had to let you sleep in a little. Don’t worry about work, I texted Devon from your phone. She’ll make your excuses for a while.”

“Thanks, man.”

“I took your picture, I hope you don’t mind,” Ryan says, holding up his camera. “And I got a little footage. I want to, um. I want to make her a baby book. I know we can’t ever show anybody, and we’ll have to print the photos here, but I don’t want to forget. She’s changing so fast.”

It’s true. Already JD’s a noticeable weight on Shane’s chest, and a week ago she was just a little beanbag of a thing. Just a furry potato with wings and hooves.

“That’s a good idea,” Shane says. “I would never have thought of that. It can be…it’ll be for us.” 

It hadn’t occurred to Shane until this moment that this will be a second thing that ties him to Ryan for life, now. The show was already that thing, a shared thing that will always be theirs, and now JD is another link in a growing chain. If they’re ever not in the same place they’ll fight over that book, and yet Shane can’t bring himself to suggest they make two copies.

Shane’s heart beats a little faster, suddenly overwhelmed by the strangeness of the knowledge they share. No one else but Ryan will ever understand, will ever share these memories with him. It’s theirs and theirs alone.

*

One other promise Ryan made has quickly been revealed to be untrue: “You won’t even notice I’m here.”

Shane notices. Ryan’s a difficult person to not notice, even for Shane, who’s had considerable practice tuning him out. He’s a noisy person, for starters. Unless he’s tired, he’s talking: to Shane, to Obi, to JD. To himself, if none of those options are viable.

Ryan’s voice is a near-constant in Shane’s life now. He’s always singing Disney songs under his breath to the baby—Shane thinks of JD as _the baby_ now that she’s started making eye contact with them, her eyes brimming with potential intelligence waiting to tip over into kinetic. Now that she’s started making a burbling, braying, excited sort of noise when she sees Shane walk in the door after work.

If he’s not singing, he’s reading. Ryan’s working his way through the first Harry Potter book out loud, in case there’s a chance JD can learn language. Whatever wrote that note learned English somehow.

(“The dialect’s just gonna confuse her, Ryan,” Shane says, listening to Ryan mangle Hagrid’s accent.

“Yer full o’shit, Shane!”)

So between the baby’s noises, and Obi’s pay-attention-to-me meowing, and Ryan’s chatter and Ryan’s whispering and Ryan’s singing, there’s a lot going on acoustically in Shane’s life that wasn’t there before.

Ryan’s also tough to ignore because his physical presence is so, well, _present_. For someone who isn’t a big guy, he takes up a lot of space. He sits with his legs spread wide; he paces; his hands are always moving, unless they’re holding JD, when they become preternaturally still and strong.

The fact of his constant existence in Shane’s space is a thing Shane has to account for now. After about two weeks in Shane’s apartment, navigating around each other with the baby, Ryan’s comfortable with him physically in a way he never was before. Ryan, as Shane always knew him in the BJD era, _before JD_ , was persnickety about touching and being touched. Ryan, as Shane is getting to know him now in this brave new AJD world, is not.

It isn’t a _problem_ for Shane. It’s just an adjustment.

It’s them cooking dinner together, Ryan wearing JD in one of those ridiculous baby slings that Shane had made fun of him about for an entire day until Shane had realized how useful it was, peeling potatoes and tapping Shane at the waist to let him know when they’re ready to boil. 

It’s Ryan tossing his socked feet in Shane’s lap while they’re watching a movie on the couch together after work—and then implying not-so-subtly that Shane might as well make himself useful with a foot rub while they’re there.

It’s Ryan lying down next to Shane on a blanket in the living room on their stomachs with JD between them, watching together as she tries to roll herself over (“it’s called tummy time, Shane, and it’s important for development!”). It’s Ryan hooking his leg over Shane’s in a moment of excitement the first time she manages, and then leaving it there.

None of these things are an issue for Shane. He doesn’t mind them. He notices them and he thinks, _huh,_ and he files them away in his mind in a folder called Things That Are New and Confusing/Terrifying. It’s a thick folder at this point.

The other surprising thing about Ryan that’s making Shane’s apartment feel very small is that he doesn’t really wear shirts. For Shane, who has known Ryan almost exclusively in shirt-wearing contexts, this is an unexpected twist.

He’s just always there, wearing soft sweatpants and no shirt. Wearing gym shorts and no shirt. Wearing, on several memorable occasions, offensively low-slung jeans _and no shirt_.

“You never wear shirts,” Shane blurts out one Saturday morning, supervising as JD rolls around happily on the floor, kicking her hooves in the air and puncturing holes in one of Obi’s old toys with her prehensile tail. “Are you allergic to cotton all of a sudden or what?”

Ryan’s just gotten back from the gym at Shane’s apartment complex. The moment he’d walked in he’d peeled his shirt off and tossed it on the floor. Now he’s kneeling on JD’s blanket, still sweaty from his workout, dangling the toy for her to grab at with her tail.

Ryan looks up at him. His hair’s sticking up all stupid.

“Skin-to-skin’s important when they’re infants,” Ryan says, a little defensive. “Skin-to-fur, I guess. I read it on…on the internet.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you’re spending too much time on mommy blogs and maybe not enough time lurking unsolved murder forums,” Shane says. He’s mostly joking; he knows skin-to-skin’s important. But Ryan’s got a _lot_ of skin, and all of it’s very taut and smooth, and it’s distracting him from saying the right things.

“Does it bother you?” Ryan asks, frowning. “If you’re uncomfortable I can try to be better about putting a shirt on. This is how I usually am at home, and I didn’t think about it.”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” Shane insists, probably a little too quickly. “I just wondered. If I looked like that I’d probably never wear a shirt either, so, fair.”

He’s said too much. He’s gone and opened his mouth and said too much. In his defense, he’s very sleep-deprived all of the time now, what with the infant cryptid who’s invaded his home and his life and his heart.

“I mean, you look okay,” Ryan says. “I think you get to call it a Dad Bod now, and those are very in.”

“Ouch,” Shane says, but he wheezes with laughter all the same.

                                                                                             *                                            

At three weeks old, JD outgrows her bassinet, starts sleeping through the night, learns to crawl on the joints of her wings, and switches to solid food. Three weeks in, Shane makes three mistakes, one right after the other.

It’s the exhaustion that does it. JD was exhausting when she was tiny and loud, keeping them up at night with the human-sounding wails, but she’s _more_ exhausting now that her needs and her mobility are greater. Whatever’s inside her that’s made of goat DNA is giving her the instinct to treat every single thing in the apartment as food: clothes, Shane’s hair, Ryan’s sneakers. Obi’s tail, much to the regret of Obi.

“This is happening too fast,” Ryan says, watching her refuse bottle after bottle and try to pull the leg of his gym shorts to her mouth using her tail. “Human babies don’t eat solid food until like four months. I thought we’d have way more time to figure out what she eats.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Shane says, watching JD drag her way over to a lamp and attempt to get the cord in her mouth. Ryan swoops her up and she kicks out with her hooves hard in protest, catching him on the bicep. “Kind of seems like she eats everything.”

It’s hard to find a place that sells goat feed in downtown L.A., but eventually Shane locates a supplier of alfalfa plants. He picks up some hay, too. He’s pretty sure the guy thinks he’s a wannabe urban farmer, because he gives Shane a lot of unsolicited tips on raising chickens, but that’s okay. Dude can think whatever he wants and he’ll never come close to the truth.

They also discover that Jersey Devils apparently love Flaming Hot Cheetos. They learn it when Ryan drops one on the floor and suddenly JD’s there underfoot, hoovering it up with relish, smacking her lips and then snapping at Ryan’s shoelaces when more do not immediately appear.

“I’ve never seen her move so fast,” Shane says, laughing. “We’re in so much trouble if she’s this food-motivated. She’s the you of cryptids.”

“I’m glad she inherited my taste for spicy food,” Ryan says, dropping another Cheeto on the floor for her. He laughs too, watching her flop around on her wing joints and push with her legs, trying to spear the Cheeto with her tail and then bleating furiously when it crumbles into pieces from the force. “I’d be embarrassed if she got your white boy taste buds.”

That Friday night after work, Shane comes home with a crib in the backseat of his car. He buys it on a whim, without discussing it with Ryan first, but it’s clear that JD is too big to sleep in the bassinet any more. She’s going to be able to worm her way out of it soon; they need those rails.

He sneaks it into his apartment, careful that the neighbors don’t see.

“Lucy, I’m home!” he shouts, putting on a thick Ricky Ricardo accent.

“Close the fuckin’ door, Ricky!” Ryan yells back. Shane nudges it shut just in the nick of time, as JD comes skittering around the corner to launch herself at his leg.

“Can you take this?” Shane asks. He foists the box into Ryan’s arms and then reaches down to scoop the baby up. She’s bigger every day. Every day when he gets home from work she looks different than she’d looked nine hours before, her leg muscles fuller, her wings steadier. She’ll be walking soon. She might, God help them, be _flying_ soon, if the wings aren’t only for show.

It’s too soon.

“I’ve been chasing her all day. I needed to finish this script today and she wouldn’t nap, and you’re _late_ ,” Ryan says. Shane gets a good look, and Ryan does appear exhausted.

“I’m sorry, I was picking this up,” Shane says. “It’s a crib. She doesn’t fit in the bassinet anymore and I keep worrying that she’s going to roll out of it.”

Ryan gets this _look_ on his face. Shane’s alarmed, because he swears for a moment that Ryan’s going to burst into tears. Instead, Ryan shoves his face into the crook of his elbow and walks away. He’s only doing a quick loop, though, and then he’s back.

“I’m fine,” Ryan says. “It’s been a goddamned day. I swear to god this child is trying to kill herself and I’m, I’m scared about her all the time. I’m scared she’s gonna hurt herself and we, I don’t, we don’t know what we’re _doing_. She’s so helpless and she depends on us and we’re fucking idiots, man.”

Shane’s not sure what to do, what to say, because Ryan’s fears are his fears. They’re every new parent’s fears. _I’m not ready for this; I can barely take care of myself; we’re doing it wrong._

“I think we’re doing okay,” Shane says slowly. “There’s no manual for this.”

He shifts the baby to his left arm and pulls Ryan into a one-armed hug with his right, and Ryan folds into it like he can barely stay upright. He doesn’t cry, as far Shane can tell. He just shoves his face into Shane’s chest and breathes.

“What if we fuck her up?” Ryan asks, muffled against Shane’s shirt.

“What, like, she grows up to be a Jersey Devil with no moral compass, laying waste to the countryside? Yeah, that would be bad, Ryan. On the bright side, nobody will know it was our fault but us.”  

Ryan snuffles a wet-sounding laugh, and when he pulls back he’s calmer.

“I ordered pizza,” he says. “Let’s watch an episode of something and eat and then put this sucker together.”

Shane sort of thought it’d be easy to put the crib together, but it’s not. It’s like putting together Ikea furniture, except the directions are worse and they’re both so tired their minds are numb. They’re too tired to even fight about it; they mechanically insert tab A into slot B and flail around with the electric drill for three straight hours while JD rams the wall of the Pack ‘N Play with her horns.

At last they’re done, and then they have to convince her to sleep in it. They have to take turns reading three chapters of Harry Potter until she settles down enough to accept the new bed. She hunkers down small, wrapping her wings around herself like an extra blanket, and fucking _finally_ she’s asleep.

It’s nearly midnight. Thank God tomorrow’s Saturday.

Ryan stretches. “I’ll probably sleep in here tonight, instead of on the couch,” he says. “In case she wakes up scared.”

“No, don’t,” Shane says before he can stop himself. “Come sleep in the bed. You’ll sleep like shit in the chair, man, and it’s a big bed. We’ll hear it on the baby monitor if she wakes up.”

That’s his first mistake.

Ryan looks at him for a moment. He scratches along his stubbly jaw, rubbing at his chin.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “No funny business,” he adds, a feeble attempt at a joke. It’s been a long day.

“Ever since the baby it’s like the magic is gone,” Shane pretends to gripe, the perfect stereotype of every shitty sitcom dad. “You’re too tired, you’ve got a headache. A man has needs, Ryan.”

“Oh my god, this is so weird,” Ryan says, shaking his head and walking out of the room. He’s laughing, though, and after the day they’ve had that’s music to Shane’s ears. “You’re the worst.”

They get ready for bed in silence. It’s already become routine after only a few quick weeks. The only difference is that this time Ryan slides into bed next to Shane, smelling like soap and mouthwash.

They’ve shared beds before, obviously, on shoots. This is different. Shane can’t say how it’s different; he just knows it is. It’s different like Ryan’s steadying hand on his hip when he nearly toppled over reaching for the drill earlier was different. It’s different like Ryan’s face buried in his chest was different.

They’re on their backs, almost touching. Almost, but not quite. It’s a big bed.

“Shane,” Ryan whispers. He reaches for Shane in the dark, getting a hand around Shane’s wrist. “I’m fuckin’ petrified. I thought I was afraid before, but that was nothing. Ghosts are nothing. Demons are, are _nothing_.”

Shane rolls over, onto his side, facing Ryan. He wishes he could see Ryan’s face better, but it’s too dark.

“You’re a good dad, Ryan,” he says. “I always thought you would be, but you’re—”

He can’t find the words for it. He can’t find the words for all the ways his heart expands and fills his chest like a balloon when he sees Ryan holding JD up high and spinning her around until she bleats joyfully. There’s nothing in his vocabulary for the fullness in him, watching Ryan walk around with her in his arms in the middle of the night, singing a lullaby in imperfect Spanish that Shane doesn’t understand.

Shane doesn’t have words for it, but he still needs Ryan to understand it. He finds Ryan’s face with his hand, letting it guide him. Shane leans down and kisses him.

That’s mistake number two.

For a handful of terrifying seconds Ryan’s mouth is frozen in surprise under his own. Shane’s about to pull away in a panic when Ryan’s hand tightens on his wrist and Ryan’s mouth opens, slipping against his, deepening the kiss. He’s warm and minty-fresh under Shane, immediately responsive with lips and tongue and a scrape of teeth at Shane’s own bottom lip.

Ryan kisses like Shane would have assumed he kissed, if Shane had allowed himself to make such assumptions. Impulsively but whole-heartedly. Imperfectly, but with the kind of attention he gives to everything else in his life.

It becomes clear fairly quickly that Ryan is not going to be the one to pull away first. Ryan’s not, in general, the person you turn to for de-escalation of a situation, and it holds true in this too. He’s already shifting against Shane like he could go for more, actually, always _more_.

Shane pulls away and flops onto his back.

“Oh my god,” Ryan says, laughing quietly, breathing hard. “I’m so tired I could die.”

Shane’s not sure what that means. It could be an excuse, like, _I only did that because I’m too tired to think straight, literally._ It could be an apology, as in, _I’d like to kiss you again but I’m too exhausted to move._

It could also be a statement of fact: _I’m tired_. Shane is also tired.

“Good night, Ryan,” Shane says, absolving himself of the responsibility of figuring it out. “Don’t be afraid. You’re a good dad. You’re doing your best, and your best is really good.”

*

The third mistake, and by far the most catastrophic of the three, doesn’t come until the next day.

It’s exactly like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors eat Muldoon. The real attack comes not from the front—not from the mistakes Shane’s well aware he’s already made, the ones he’s got his eyes steadily trained on—but from the side. From the secret lurking mistake he didn’t even know was there.

Shane wakes up with his body curled around Ryan’s, plastered to him from chest to ankle, arm slung around his waist. JD’s miraculously let them sleep. He can hear her deep snuffling breathing on the monitor, so she’s not up yet, which means he doesn’t have to be up yet either.

He’s up, though. Certain parts of himself are very up, and that’s anywhere from uncomfortable to a disaster, depending on what Ryan has to say about it. 

Shane’s trying to figure out how to extricate himself from the situation when Ryan goes very stiff in his arms. It’s the only clue he gets that Ryan’s awake, because otherwise Ryan doesn’t move or shift or say a word. Even his breathing stays regular.

“Morning,” Shane says, because if somebody doesn’t say something first they’ll be trapped in this horrible fake-sleep limbo forever. He shifts his hips back a little, putting a single essential inch between them, but he doesn’t move his hand from Ryan’s stomach. The compromise play.

“Morning, big guy,” Ryan says, yawning. He stretches, and as he does so his shirt rides up, leaving Shane’s hand flat against his bare belly.

“So—” Shane starts to say, but he’s interrupted by JD’s horrible human-sounding cry, and then Ryan’s jumping up to grab her before Shane can say another word. Shane goes from hard in his sweats to not hard in the blink of an eye. There’s nothing like a screaming baby to ruin a perfectly good hard-on, even one that was going to go to waste anyway.

The mistake comes over breakfast. Ryan’s in a good mood that morning, which Shane doesn’t want to interrogate too closely. They both got a solid eight hours of sleep for the first time in weeks, and surely that has something to do with it. Shane’s eggs are particularly good, the yolks just the right amount of runny. JD’s on her best behavior, having miraculously not put anything into her mouth yet this morning that she shouldn’t.

So of course Shane has to ruin it. He’ll learn later, much later, that the sports term for it is an _unforced error_. He’s giving away points left and right because he doesn’t know enough to take the shot.

“I was thinking,” Shane says. “You’ve been running yourself ragged, and you must be—it’s got to be hard. If you want to go out tonight, I’d be happy to keep JD alone for the night.”

Ryan doesn’t look up from buttering his toast. “What do you mean, go out?”

Shane coughs. He doesn’t want to make this uncomfortable, but it occurred to him as he lay in bed trying to talk his boner down that it’s really not fair to be going and kissing Ryan when Ryan is essentially trapped here by circumstance. It’s been an intense three weeks and Ryan’s been—pent up here, parenting a cryptid. He’s probably so stir-crazy he barely knows which way is up. It’s got to be a nightmare for an active, extroverted guy like him.

“I don’t know. It’s Saturday. Go out with your boys. Maybe meet a girl. Maybe sleep in your own bed.”

“Meet a girl,” Ryan repeats. There’s something in his tone that should’ve been a warning, but Shane barrels on like a first-class idiot.

“Yeah, I just…you’re a young guy. Social. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t, you know, have a normal life.”

“A normal life,” Ryan says. Shane’s starting to get nervous about the echo. They both look down at JD, who’s shoveling hay into her mouth with her tail while simultaneously playing with a stacking toy with her tiny hands. Three weeks old and she’s already a better multi-tasker than Ryan. Three weeks old and she’s already less of a dumbass than Shane.

“Well. As normal as it can be. I’m worried you’re doing stuff you don’t want to be doing because you don’t have other options,” Shane says. “I want you to have options. I don’t—you can’t feel obligated, or. Or confused by the situation.”

“To be clear,” Ryan says, laying down the butter knife, and his voice is polite but icy. “You’re telling me that kissing me was a mistake and I should go get my dick wet to forget about it.”

“Uh,” Shane says. He can tell he’s in trouble, can tell it the second Ryan puts the knife down on his plate with a dainty _clink_ , but he’s not quite sure why. “I wasn’t going to put it like that.”

“Right,” Ryan says, standing up from the table abruptly. His hands are in fists at his sides. “Well. I can’t be here, because I’m not okay with punching a wall in front of the baby and that’s what’s going to fucking happen if I have to look at your face for, like, a _second_ longer.”

He’s at the door in the time it takes Shane to blink, nudging his feet in his sneakers, wallet in one hand and keys in the other.

“I don’t understand what’s happening here,” Shane says. He’s trying not to yell. He can feel JD looking at him, at Ryan, back to him. He can tell that she’s sensed the change in the energy of the room. She’s really sensitive to that sort of thing, which is why they’re so careful not to fight in front of her. “I don’t understand why you’re pissed.”

“Oh, you don’t understand why I’m,” Ryan starts, and then he snorts. “You kissed _me_. You kissed me and you told me I was _such a good dad_. And now you’re telling me to go get some pussy and you don’t know why I’m _pissed_?”

“Jesus, Ry, not in front of—”

“Oh no, you don’t get to ‘Ry’ me,” Ryan says. Shane’s not sure he’s ever seen Ryan this mad, and they’ve had some killer arguments in the four years they’ve been friends and coworkers. “We’re not together. No fucking pet names for you. You don’t get to lecture me on what I do or don’t say in front of my own—”

Ryan stops cold, because of course she’s not his own anything, not really. She’s not his any more than she’s Shane’s. JD is her own creature, one they’re just lucky enough to get to take care of for a while, to see into the next phase of her impossibly vast and unknowable life.

Shane can tell that Ryan’s stricken with it, the sudden realization that it will all be over so soon. She grows so fast. She’ll be out of their lives in no time, as suddenly as she came into it.

Shane wants to reach out for Ryan, to comfort him, to say _something_ , but he can’t. If looks could kill, the one on Ryan’s face would have felled him already.

And then Ryan’s out the door and JD is wailing behind him, that terrible braying scream that makes Shane’s stomach clench and cramp up like he might be sick.

*

Ryan’s gone all day and all night. He’s gone until midday Sunday. He comes back hungover, with bags under his eyes and a hickey on his neck.

He greets Shane with a defiant jut of his chin, daring Shane to say something about it, but he can’t. Shane doesn’t get to be mad at him and they both know it. He’s only gone and done exactly what Shane told him to do.

“I missed you, pumpkin!” Ryan says to JD, swooping her up. Her tail swishes up to wrap loosely around his neck, affectionate rather than threatening. “How’s my girl?”

Ryan doesn’t talk to Shane about anything but the baby for three days. It’s actually sort of impressive. Shane’s never known Ryan to hold a grudge. He’s usually a flare of temper, a good yell, and then done. He’s nursing the hell out of this one, though.

It might have gone on for longer, but JD gets sick of it and solves it in her own way.

Shane’s at work on Tuesday, the afternoon creeping by. People are starting to get genuinely worried about Ryan, and they’re coming to Shane for answers. It’s stressful trying to hold them off. It’s difficult lying to TJ and Devon in particular, and “family emergency” will only cut it so long. Ryan’s done an admirable job keeping up with the work, so nobody’s in trouble, but it’s only a matter of time before the demands of the show will require him in the office. Shane doesn’t know what to do about that.

He’s trying to dodge TJ for the third time that week when he gets a text from Ryan.

 **Ryan** : GO TO THE BATHROOM RIGHT NOW. THE ONE-STALL ON THE THIRD FLOOR

Shane texts back _???_ but Ryan doesn’t answer.

Shane figures that even a weird, cryptic text is better than nothing. He goes up to the bathroom, which is blessedly empty.

 **Ryan** : r u there yet

 **Shane** : Yes. What’s up? Is everything ok?

In response, Ryan sends a video. Shane makes sure the volume’s turned down very low, and then he hits play.

Ryan’s holding his phone, and the phone’s shaking from him laughing. Shane can hear his voice from offscreen.

“You can do it, hon. Shane, she’s—she’s almost there. God, she wants it so bad. Come on, show Dada how close you are.”

Shane clutches his phone. In the video Ryan’s dangling a pizza crust just out of the reach of JD’s tail. She keeps trying to lever herself up onto her hind legs to get it.

And then—she does it. She’s up on her back legs, standing all on her own, her wings beating like crazy for balance. Bipedal, like they thought.

“Yes!” Ryan crows. He scoots back, bringing the pizza crust with him. JD takes a tentative step forward. And then another. And then—she _hops_. Exactly like a fucking kangaroo. Before Ryan can react she’s snatched the pizza crust out of his hand with her little taloned arm.

Ryan roars with excitement and drops the phone. Shane hears him shout “holy shit!” and then the video ends.

Shane watches it again. He watches it a third time. He can’t believe he missed it.

He heads back to his desk in a daze. He grabs his keys and his wallet and his laptop on autopilot. He heads for the parking lot and he doesn’t look back. The second he’s through the office doors, he _runs_.

The minute he steps foot in the apartment, Ryan’s on him with a huge, excited bear hug. The thrill of JD’s first steps—first hops?—has wiped all the tension of their fight away.

“Come see,” Ryan says. He’s breathless, his face is flushed, his hair’s a wreck. He’s even wearing a shirt, but Shane still thinks it’s the best he’s ever looked.

They spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on opposite ends of the living room, sending JD back and forth between them. The floodgates have been opened; now that she knows she can do it she’s toddling from Ryan to Shane and back again effortlessly.

“I can’t believe they _hop_ ,” Ryan says. “Not quite what I imagined when we filmed the ep.”

“She is the terror that hops in the night,” Shane says. “I’m sure she’ll be intimidating when she grows up, in her own way.”

They both look down. JD’s taken a break from her hop-walking to gnaw on Shane’s shoe, the very picture of innocence.

What Shane wants to do is apologize. He’s still not entirely sure he knows what he’s apologizing for, so it might backfire, but he knows Ryan was upset and he knows it was his fault, and that’s enough to be starting with.

“Come here!” Ryan says. He claps his hands together and then spreads them wide for JD to bound unsteadily into.

“Ryan,” Shane says. Ryan looks up at him. “Ryan, man, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that I wanted you to leave. I just, I needed you to remember that life exists outside of this apartment.”

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “I know. It’s okay. I’m—this whole thing was my idea. I’m here because I want to be here. I’m not, like, trapped in the tallest tower of your big gay makeout castle.”

Shane needs him to understand.

“When she grows up, when she’s old enough,” Shane says, “she won’t be here anymore. I don’t know what will happen then, but I want you to have the life you want and not the life that you got stuck with.”

“Thanks, man. Noted.”

Ryan doesn’t seem mad, but he’s also not looking at Shane. He’s looking at JD, who’s batting around a little toy basketball between her arms and her tail.

“With a jump shot like that I think she’s got a real chance at going pro,” Shane says. “She gets that from you.”

“Be careful, honey, you’ll puncture it,” Ryan says, as the diamond tip of her tail narrowly misses stabbing the ball straight through the middle. “Remember what happened to the soccer ball?” 

She stares at him, willful and defiant, and plunges the tip of her tail into the ball. It deflates with a loud _pbbbbbbbbt_.

“She gets that from me,” Shane says, all too aware that he too seems to have developed a knack for ruining everything he touches.

*

It’s Ryan’s turn to fuck up, and fuck up he does.

He goes to the gym one night, and when he comes back he slinks into the apartment in a way Shane considers highly suspicious.

“What did you do?” Shane demands.

“I didn’t _do_ anything,” Ryan says, and then he backpedals. “Well. No, I did. But it wasn’t my fault.”

“Out with it, Bergara.”

“I ran into your upstairs neighbor on my way back from the gym,” Ryan says. “Delia something. Tall, blonde, nosy? She asked who I was. I think she thought I was some rando who’s been using the complex’s facilities.”

“What did you tell her?” Shane asks.

He can see where this is going. Ryan’s a smart guy, but he doesn’t do his best thinking on his feet. He’s best after a few hours or days, when he’s had time to prepare. His cheeks are flushed and he’s got that vaguely evasive look on his face.

“I told her I was your, um. Your boyfriend. Well actually I said partner, because you’re almost thirty-three and ‘boyfriend’ just sounds…”

“Sure,” Shane says, waving it off. As far as lies go, not the worst. Not even entirely a lie, for certain definitions of _partner_.

“Yeah, well, that’s not all,” Ryan says. “She asked about the baby. Like, she lives above you and she sometimes hears her crying, so.”

“So?”

“So I told her we were fostering a friend’s baby while the friend goes through rehab.”

It’s actually significantly better than Shane feared, coming from Ryan on the spur of the moment. It explains the sudden appearance of an apparent baby, and it will explain the baby’s sudden disappearance too, if and when it comes to that. Shane might be able to get out of the whole thing without having to move.

“That seems okay,” Shane says. “Very noble of us. And yet you’re still nervous and twitchy. Why are you so nervous and twitchy, Ryan?”

“She wants to meet the baby,” Ryan says with a wince. “They’re having a complex-wide social hour this weekend and we’ve been invited. And if we don’t go she’s going to _drop by with dinner since y’all must be so overwhelmed._ Her words.”

“But Ryan, she can’t meet the baby,” Shane says, stating the obvious. “The baby is not a human baby. The baby is a…something else baby.”

“That’s true,” Ryan says. “Yeah, that was also my sticking point, but a lot was happening very quickly and I panicked and said we’d come.”

“Which means we need to procure a human baby on relatively short notice, then,” Shane says, his heart sinking into his stomach. “There’s an app for that, right? Rent-A-Baby or something?”

They stay up late trying to figure it out, but there is no Rent-A-Baby app. There’s no clean solution at all, that Shane can see. Ryan’s chewing on his lip and rubbing his chin, and he’s got that look on his face that says he might have an idea but he doesn’t think Shane will like it.

“Okay, out with it.”

“Well, you know that saying about how it takes a village to raise a child?”

“Sure,” Shane says, not quite following.

“I think it’s time to let our village in on this secret,” Ryan says. “Because I think I know where we can get a baby.”

*

 **Shane** : Hey man.

 **TJ** : Dude it’s 11pm. Did you mean to text your booty call?

 **Shane** : Har har. Listen, I need a small favor.

 **Shane** : I need to borrow your baby this Saturday afternoon for like…two hours. Tops.

 **Shane** : And you can’t tell Kate.

 **Shane** : And I will also need you to stay in my apartment for that time and babysit.

 **TJ** : Well…no. No, you can’t borrow my baby. Shane wtf

 **Shane** : It’s a Ryan thing. If you come over to my place for dinner on Friday we’ll fill you in. Bring Devon.

 **TJ** : Wait, babysit?!                                   

*

TJ and Devon show up at 6 pm on the dot on Friday evening, looking nervous. Devon’s got a bottle of wine clutched in her hand, and the first thing she does when Shane opens the door is shove it into his hand.

Shane lets them in, and TJ cocks his head and sniffs the air. “It smells weird in here. Why does it smell like grass, and not the fun kind?”

“That would probably be all the alfalfa,” Shane says. “And the hay. I’ve got a sprouts guy.”

“TJ said it was a Ryan thing,” Devon says. “Is he here?”

“Yeah, he is,” Shane says. “He’s been here the whole time.”

“What do you mean, you’ve got a _sprouts guy_?”

As if he hears his name, Ryan comes out of the nursery. He’s wearing jeans and a button-down, having made an effort; Shane knows he’s missed seeing their coworkers, and he feels guilty about that even though Ryan’s the one who volunteered to do it.

He’s also got the baby sling wrapped around him, and JD tucked up close to his chest. Soon she’ll be too big to carry comfortably that way. Shane feels a familiar pang in his chest, that feeling he gets all the time now, watching Ryan with JD.

“Is that a _baby_?” Devon asks, at the same time as TJ demands, “Who let Ryan have a baby?”

“Sort of,” Shane says, at the same time as Ryan says, “Yes.”

“Okay,” Shane amends, after the briefest of arguments with Ryan, communicated entirely via eye contact. “Yes, it’s a baby. But it’s not a _baby_ baby.”

Devon takes a few steps over, to get a closer look. She must catch sight of a hoof or a horn because she stops cold, her hand outstretched. “Ryan,” she breathes out.

“Please don’t freak out,” Ryan says. “She’s really sensitive to noise and I’d rather she didn’t—”

Shane knows how nervous Ryan’s been all day about this. Bringing TJ and Devon in on their secret was his idea, but it’s still a big step. It’s still a risk. 

Ryan’s unwinding the baby sling, not looking at any of them. Shane knows JD missed her nap today and he’s worried she’ll be fussy, but when Ryan sets her down on the floor she makes a beeline for Shane, hop-walking over as fast as her legs will carry her to plaster herself against Shane’s shin.

“Go see Aunt Devon,” he says to her, pointing at Devon and giving JD a little push in the right direction. Devon’s got her mouth open in shock as JD gamely hops over and unfurls her wings, fluttering them in the demanding way that Shane knows means _up_.

The wings flutter harder, and JD flings her little arms wide.

“She wants you to pick her up, Dev,” Ryan says softly. He’s staring at Devon. “She’s trying to fly up to you but she can’t yet.”

Honestly, Devon’s not the one Shane’s worried about. Devon’s too sweet, too easily swayed by any soft, needy thing, to not fall in love with JD. He’s worried about TJ, about TJ who can be abrasive and who accepts no bullshit. About TJ, whose wife recently gave birth to their own human baby, and who might resent the implication that the creature in front of him is anything like that to Shane and Ryan. Even though she is.

Devon bends down to pick up JD. It can be hard to figure out how to do it at first—JD’s got a lot going on, after all, legs and arms and tail and wings—but she hooks her hands under the wing joints and lifts up, settling the baby on her hip like a natural.

JD takes to her immediately. She’s never met another living creature other than Shane, Ryan, and Obi before, and Shane had been worried about that too. He thought there was some small chance there would be an instinctual mistrust there, a prey instinct or even, god forbid, a predator instinct that might kick in. But instead she nestles in, laying her snout on Devon’s forearm.

“What is it?” TJ asks.

“She,” Ryan corrects, even though they still don’t know that for sure. They probably never will.

“She’s a. Wow, this is going to sound stupid, and I didn’t believe it at first either, but—”

“She’s a Jersey Devil,” Ryan says. He pulls the note out of his back pocket and hands it to TJ. “This was on my porch last month, along with a huge egg in a bassinet.”

“This is a joke, right?” TJ asks, scanning the letter. “This is a prank?”

Devon looks over at him, shaking her head. “TJ…” JD’s snuffling her snout along the length of Devon’s arm, scenting the ghost of her lunchtime meal.

“It’s not a joke, man,” Shane says. He shrugs, helpless, because he knows how absurd it is. He knows that if it were him, he’d have the exact same look on his face. Just a month ago he _did_. “We watched her hatch. I saw it happen with my own eyes, or I wouldn’t believe it either.”

“We’ve been, um, raising her,” Ryan says. “Yeah, I know, but she’s not like a pet, Teej. She’s got…she’s smart.”

“Come see,” Devon says, turning to TJ. “Come touch her. She’s soft.”

“The Jersey Devil isn’t _real_ ,” TJ says. “We filmed that whole episode and all we saw was a couple of deer and a flock of birds that scared Ryan shitless.” He’s still mostly talking to Shane, trying to reason with him.

“Maybe, but something saw us,” Shane says. “Look, man, I don’t understand it either. But JD’s here now and we need your help.”

“JD?” Devon asks. “Like from Scrubs?”

“Short for Jersey Devil,” Ryan says. Devon laughs, a beautiful ringing bell-peal of a laugh, and JD bleats her happiest bleat in response.

“Oh, she’s—is she laughing?” TJ asks, surprised. He goes over to Devon and crouches down, eye-level with JD. He looks in her eyes, and she looks right back at him, intelligent but without guile. He reaches out to touch the delicate webbing of her wings and she tries to scoop his hair into her mouth with her tail.

“Do you want to hold her?” Devon asks TJ. He hesitates for a second, and then his eyes flick to Ryan. Shane, whose eyes are _always_ flicking to Ryan to inventory his mood, already knows what he’ll find there: desperate, breathless hope. Ryan needs TJ to be on their team.

“Of course,” TJ says, and he lets Devon hoist JD into his arms. He cradles her like he’d cradle his own son. She’s getting ornery; she kicks up into the air with her hooves and catches the pull of his hoodie with her front talon, pulling it tight around his neck. “She’s only a month old?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says, and there’s a downturn of his mouth when he says it, a subtle misery for only Shane to see. “Yeah, she grows fast. She started walking a week ago. She stopped taking a bottle then, too. She knows what she wants, which is lucky, because we sure as shit don’t.”

“Well, congratulations, Ryan,” TJ says, shaking his head. “One of your lunatic things is finally real. You solved it. I hope you’re filming this crazy shit, let’s crack into the wine.”

“We’re sort of filming it,” Shane says, helping TJ set JD in her Pack ‘N Play and getting out the wine glasses. “But it’s not…it’s only for us.”

“Nobody can know,” Ryan cuts in, and he’s deadly serious now. “Guys, you can’t tell anybody. Not even Kate, Teej. You can tell her eventually, but not yet.” 

TJ crosses his heart with his finger, two quick slashes. Devon’s preoccupied watching JD play, but she nods in agreement. JD’s fitting wooden shapes into their matching cut-outs; she easily slides the star-shaped block into its corresponding star-shaped hole and bangs her horns against the side when it falls into the box with a _thunk_.

“Jesus,” TJ says. “She’s like a fifteen-month-old.”

They sit down to dinner, macaroni and cheese because Shane’s always too tired to cook for real now, and they make a plan that will allow Ryan to be in the office for filming a few times a week. Fortunately it’s True Crime on deck, which means they won’t have to travel.

They’re all the way through the meal and about to crack into a box of frozen Thin Mints for dessert when TJ says, “So what’s this about needing to borrow Silas?”

Shane and Ryan glance at each other.

“Ryan got cornered by a neighbor earlier this week and came up with a lie to explain the baby noises,” Shane explains. “And now we’re roped into going to this apartment social event at the clubhouse tomorrow and people will be expecting a baby to be present. A human baby.”

“We were hoping you might bring Silas over for an hour or two,” Ryan says. “And then we could take him over to the clubhouse and you could hang here with JD. It’s—we didn’t know who else to ask. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve become extremely seasoned professionals, so he’ll be in good hands.”

“Ryan, a month ago I wouldn’t have loaned you my car if you asked, let alone my kid.”  

“But?” Ryan asks hopefully.

“But I guess if you’ve kept a baby of another species alive for a month you can probably be trusted with a human one for an hour,” TJ concludes.

Ryan pumps his fist in the air. It takes a village, and they _have_ a village. 

It’s an immeasurable relief, to have brought other trusted people into this huge part of their lives they couldn’t share before. Ryan’s come alive around TJ and Devin; he’s chatting animatedly, laughing more than Shane’s seen him laugh since their fight. Ryan’s a lot like JD; he’s so responsive to the energy around him, and Shane’s energy lately has been lacking.

Shane thinks they’re both doing pretty well by JD. The dad thing’s going okay. Where he’s dropping the ball is as a co-parent. He needs to do better for Ryan.

*

The next day, getting ready to go over to the clubhouse for the shindig (white people always call gatherings like this _shindigs_ , and Shane knows it but he can’t prevent himself from doing it anyway), feels like putting on their armor for war.

Or, no, not quite. It feels like Shane’s putting on his Shane Costume, the assembled parts of his aesthetic that a fan might pull together for her half of a Ghoulboys couple’s costume. Red-checked button-down, check. Denim jacket, check. Chinos, check. Glasses, check. Product in his hair again, which has needed cutting for about two weeks, only he hasn’t had the time: check. Maybe this _is_ his version of armor.

“Nice Shane Madej cosplay,” Ryan says when Shane steps out of the bathroom. “Almost like the real thing.”

Ryan’s one to talk. He’s replaced the basketball shorts with dark jeans and the t-shirts with a short-sleeved button-down that pulls tight on his biceps and at his chest. He’s abandoned the hats for once, and his hair’s shiny and soft-looking on his forehead. JD on his hip completes the picture.

Shane whistles, just to see Ryan go a little flustered around the edges.

“Look who’s putting in the work,” he says. “You’re going to have to beat the thirtysomething soccer moms off with a stick.”

“Shane, _you’re_ basically a thirtysomething soccer mom now,” Ryan points out.

“Yeah, guess so,” Shane agrees. “So beat me off already.”

He doesn’t know what makes him make the joke, except that Ryan’s blushing, stammering “uhhh” of a laugh, when it comes, is highly rewarding.

He flicks at a button on Ryan’s shirt. “Really putting the tensile strength of that fabric to the test, huh? It’s chambray, Ryan. It can only do so much.”

He’s flirting. He knows he’s flirting. Ryan almost certainly knows he’s flirting, judging by the sideways glance he gives Shane after he deposits the baby in Shane’s arms and goes into the bathroom to fuss with his hair some more.

And why shouldn’t Shane flirt a little? God knows he isn’t flirting with anyone else. He can have a little harmless fun.

“You’ve got a mouth on you today, as my mom would say,” Ryan says, looking critically in the mirror. “Jesus, I’ve aged a year in the last month.”

“Just trying to keep the spark alive,” Shane says. “Don’t be so critical. You look great. Delia-from-upstairs is going to see you cooing at a baby and try to steal you from me.”

“Okay, that’s enough. I don’t _coo_.” Ryan emerges from the bathroom. As he goes he crosses his eyes at JD and makes a silly face, and she collapses into tumultuous brays of laughter and kicks her hooves together like she’s clapping. He also cups Shane’s arm around the elbow for a second as he passes.

TJ and Devon show up with baby Silas in tow a few minutes later. Devon’s tagging along for moral support, and because none of them really know what will happen when Ryan and Shane both leave the apartment. One of them’s always been here with JD, the entire month.

This must be how all new parents feel, leaving their baby with a sitter for the first time. Suddenly Shane can imagine what it would be like if any of this was normal. Passing the baby off to the sitter. Trying to hustle Ryan through the door before she started crying. A hand on his lower back, “emergency numbers are on the fridge!” and then out to dinner and a movie for the first time in months.

It feels a little like a date night. It’s not, it’s an elaborate ruse, but it feels like it.

TJ’s giving them a long list of instructions for the care and keeping of baby Silas, hoisting a diaper bag over Ryan’s shoulder. Ryan’s trying to do the exact same thing to him simultaneously, rattling off JD’s favorite toys and what to do if she starts doing her creepy cry-yell thing. Shane leans against the couch to watch them try to out-nervous-dad each other.

Finally they’ve got the babies switched and settled. Shane’s got Silas snug against his side, Ryan’s got the diaper bag, and TJ’s holding onto JD’s tail to prevent her from hopping pell-mell around the living room. Devon stands back, her arms crossed, and shakes her head.

“My boys,” she says with a watery-sounding sigh. “You’re all so…”

“Oh my god, Dev,” Ryan says, looking embarrassed.

“No, I mean it,” she insists. “A few months ago you were all…and now you’re…”

“Don’t you let her cry,” Shane tells TJ. “Distract her with the baby.”

They’re out the door with Silas before TJ can change his mind, and before Devon can get too caught up in her feelings.

The apartment complex’s clubhouse is several buildings down, and Shane’s not sure he’s been in it more than three times since he signed his lease there eight months ago. Ryan’s in there all the time, because that’s where the gym is, and he steers them capably through the door and into the big open room that serves as a party space.

Shane’s never met most of his neighbors, but it’s a weird mix: older retired folks, middle-aged couples with no kids, a few young professionals about his and Ryan’s age who look equally confused about what they’re doing there. Even a couple of college kids, there for the free food.

“Oh sweet, guacamole!” Ryan says. He descends on the food table immediately, leaving Shane to hoist the baby up higher and follow.

“Shane, it’s so nice to see you here!” Delia-from-upstairs is swooping in before they can even fill a plate of food. “You never come to our mixers. I ran into your young man here at the gym and had to practically strongarm him!”

“Yes, we work and travel a lot, so—”

“And this must be the baby!” she squeals.                  

“This is Silas,” Shane says. “He’s not ours, we’re just—fostering, for a friend. I hope he’s not too loud. We try our best but he’s little still, and um, teething—” Shane’s not sure if a five-month-old baby would be teething yet, but Ryan’s not glaring at him so he’s probably fine.

Delia waves his concerns away with a well-manicured hand. “Nonsense, he’s a doll, we hardly know he’s there,” she says. “Anyway, that’s apartment life!”

She insists on introducing them to some other neighbors, people he’s seen coming and going but never stopped to talk to.

“Everyone, this is Shane,” she says. “In 14A, under mine and Mike’s unit.”

Shane goes to introduce Ryan as his boyfriend, but it does sound a little juvenile. “And my, uh, partner. Ryan.”

“Aren’t you the handsome pair!” one of Delia’s friends clucks. “How did you two meet?”

Shane’s brain is whirring with all the stories he’s being expected to keep straight. People are looking at him expectantly, and he needs to come out with a smooth, believable lie, and he can’t think of a single one that won’t reveal how emotionally compromised he is.

Suddenly Ryan’s arm is around his waist. He gives Shane’s side an affectionate squeeze.

“We met through work,” Ryan says easily. “We’re producers at a digital media company and we hit it off a few years ago, worked closely for a while, and that was that. We sort of woke up one day and we were more.”

It’s _not_ a lie, is the thing. Shane’s looking at the story from all directions and he sees nothing but truth in it. He’s not entirely sure what the _more_ is yet, but he knows that JD’s presence in their lives has changed how he looks at Ryan permanently. Working so closely with him to keep her happy and healthy has softened every edge of Ryan, for Shane; has turned him fuzzy and backlit and crucial.

How do you come back from that? Shane doesn’t know how they will fall back into the old routine after it’s all done. He doesn’t know how to go on camera without making the strength of this link obvious to everyone who looks at them.

Ryan shifts closer, pressed warmly at Shane’s side, and squeezes again to get Shane’s attention. It brings Shane back to himself.

“—almost exactly a year ago now, I guess. We were at Knotts Berry Farm for a, uh, work retreat, and it was just, you know, the best day. And I looked over at this beanpole and all I could think was, my life would be so much shittier without him in it.”

Again, that clean aftertaste of truth _._ Shane remembers the day they shot at the Boysenberry Festival well. They’d been in the best of moods that day, playing off each other perfectly, getting wilder and wilder until Annie made them take a break and ride a couple of rides to get some energy out.

“What about you, big guy?” Ryan asks, throwing in a playful wink for the full effect. “When did you, like, _know_?”  

“About us?” This seems awfully personal, for a conversation with a bunch of strangers he’s never met before. Is this really normal casual chat talk for couples? Do they stand around and talk about how they met and fell in love like they’re talking about the weather?

“Yeah, babe,” Ryan says. He slides his hand into the back pocket of Shane’s chinos like it’s nothing.

“Two years ago,” Shane says without thinking, speaking from his gut and his instinct. “We were on a work trip to northern California, and we went—hiking, and he had on the stupidest vest thing and a helmet because he was worried about being, uh, shot by a hunter. It rained and he looked ridiculous and he was such a good sport about it. I don’t know, that sounds dumb.”

He says the last part to Ryan directly, not to the group, but Ryan’s shaking his head.

“It’s not dumb,” he says. “That was a good day too.”

“Oh, you two are so cute, I can hardly stand it,” Delia says.

“Can you take the baby?” Shane asks Ryan. “I’m sorry, I need to run to the bathroom.”

He passes Silas off to Ryan and makes a beeline for the exit. He just needs a little fresh air. He needs to not have Ryan’s hand in his pocket, on his hip, adjusting the collar of his shirt. He needs a little room to breathe. 

He sits on the stoop outside for a few minutes at least, trying to get his head around this. He’s too _in it_. He can no longer tell what’s real and what isn’t, not even inside himself. Because now he thinks back, all the way back to the filming of the Bigfoot ep (Ryan shoving that enormous burger in his face, Ryan’s ridiculous helmet hair wet from rain, Ryan cracking open a beer on a log), and he thinks: _maybe I did know then_. _Maybe long before the egg, I already knew._

“I didn’t realize pretending to be romantically involved with me would be so taxing you’d have to bail in under twenty minutes,” Ryan says from behind him. “But I’m not surprised.”

“What can I say, the butt-grabbing wore me down fast,” Shane says. “I should have known you’d be handsy.”

“Are you okay?”

Shane considers this. He’s happier than he’s been in his whole life. He’s exhausted. He’s confused. Holding TJ’s baby makes him miss JD fiercely, even though she’s only a block away.

“I’m fine. I think you’re just a better actor than me, is all.”

“Maybe I am,” Ryan says, but he doesn’t gloat. He sits next to Shane on the stoop, bouncing Silas on his knee. Silas burbles and blows spit bubbles.

“What did you tell your roommates?” Shane asks. “About why you’re not living there right now.”

He’s been wondering this for weeks, but he’s never asked. He’s been afraid to find out how disrupted Ryan’s life has become, for fear he’ll get a glimpse at how deep the well of Ryan’s unspoken resentment might go.

“I told them I was seeing someone,” Ryan says. “I told them I’ve been working a lot and their place is much closer to work, so it makes sense to stay over most of the time.”

“Their place?” Shane asks, wondering about the slippery pronoun. He doesn’t mean to pry, but Ryan’s a popular guy. He’s close with his friends, close with his family. Going off the grid like this must have provoked questions.

“I didn’t specify,” Ryan says. “Thanks for noticing.”

“Didn’t they think it was weird that you brought a girl home a couple weeks ago, if you’re serious enough to basically move in with somebody?”

“We didn’t go to my place, we went to his,” Ryan says. Shane’s about to make a general noise of agreement when he processes what Ryan said, and it comes out more like a humiliating squeak instead. “Oh, stop, don’t. I’m not going to explain myself,” Ryan adds. He sounds cross.

Shane has some follow-up questions: _was it the first time? Have you done it before? Was it because of me? Did you like it? Would you do it again?_

He can’t ask any of them. Maybe one day, when the memory of their kiss and the ensuing argument is less fresh, Ryan will tell him about it. For right now, he recognizes it as a part of Ryan’s life that doesn’t belong to him—particularly because it only so recently started belonging to _Ryan_.

“I found three new gray hairs this week,” Shane says instead. “Two of them have JD’s name on them, but one of them’s all yours, bud.”

Ryan stands up again. He adjusts the baby and holds out his hand for Shane’s.

“Come on. If we don’t get back in there they’re going to think we fled and come find us at home, where our devil baby lives,” he says.

Home. Somewhere along the way, Ryan stopped calling it _your place_ and started calling it _home_. Shane didn’t notice it happen, probably because Ryan spends so much time in the apartment that he doesn’t often get the chance to talk about it in the abstract like that.

And then it hits Shane, what’s so different. What the _more_ is. They’re a family. He has a family of his own, now. It’s the definition of unconventional, and it doesn’t look like TJ’s, and his parents wouldn’t understand it, but that’s what it is.

He takes Ryan’s hand and lets Ryan haul him up to standing.

“Maybe don’t grope me in front of our neighbors and TJ’s child,” he says. “I know it’s hard to resist all this fine ass, but try to control yourself.”

Ryan makes a show of checking.

“I see no ass,” he says. “Flat as a board. Like resting my hand against a wall.”

“This is verbal abuse,” Shane says. “When we land in couple’s therapy in three years I’m going to pull this card out and play it against you.”

Ryan laughs, his head thrown back. He doesn’t fight Shane on the couple part, or the three years part. He doesn’t scurry away from any of it, and Shane’s not sure what that means. Maybe nothing.

When they go back inside, Ryan still has hold of Shane’s hand. He’s a good actor.

*

They sleep in the same bed every night now.

They don’t talk about it. Shane doesn’t offer, and Ryan doesn’t ask. It just happens.

Logistically it makes sense. Ryan’s old enough that he really can’t sleep on a couch or in a recliner for weeks or months without it eventually taking a physical toll. Shane already feels bad enough about all the sacrifices Ryan’s making for this. He doesn’t want Ryan’s lower back pain on his conscience too, on top of everything else.

So when Ryan crawls into bed next to him one night Shane doesn’t push back.

Ryan burrows down so only his nose, eyes, eyebrows, and hair peek out at Shane over the comforter.

“Yyyyr brrd cmmmmfff,” Ryan says. It sounds like he’s speaking Welsh, all consonants and no vowels.

“Pardon?” Shane asks. “I couldn’t hear you through the ten pounds of blanket over your mouth.”

“I said your bed’s comfortable,” Ryan says, pulling the blanket down. He tilts his chin a little, like he’s daring Shane to point out that Ryan was invited neither to get into the bed nor to pass judgment on it. “Firm.”

“I sprang for a new mattress last year,” Shane says. He’s not quite sure how to make conversation about the bed while in the bed. While in the bed with Ryan. The last time they were in this bed together it went pear-shaped pretty quickly, and while that probably wasn’t the bed’s fault Shane can’t help but hold it against the bed a little. If the bed had been less comfortable, the kissing probably wouldn’t have happened.

Shane’s thought the word _bed_ so many times in the last fifteen seconds that it no longer carries the cadence of a real word.

“Love a good firm bed,” Ryan says. “Yup. Firm. Bounce a quarter right off it.” 

“Are you having a stroke?” Shane asks. “Do I need to call someone?”

He has a hunch Ryan’s feeling weird about the whole situation too, and pushing through it with the sheer force of manic idle chatter. As coping mechanisms go, he’s heard of worse.

“Call 9-1-1 for the heart attack you’re about to have,” Ryan says, and then he presses his freezing cold bare foot in between Shane’s shins.

Shane yelps, and Ryan shushes him through laughter. “You’re going to wake her up and she took forever to go down tonight, man.”

“Don’t you shush me,” Shane hisses. “How are your feet that cold and yet you still have feet?”

“I don’t know, Shane. How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren’t real?” Ryan shoots back.

“Calm down, noted Twitter philosopher Jaden Smith. Keep your cold-ass feet on your side of the bed. Don’t make me explain to JD why Dada had to kill Papa.”

Ryan shoves his other foot in between Shane’s, joining the first. Shane doesn’t kick him away and so he leaves them there, his feet tangled up with Shane’s legs, long after they’re warm again.

Shane’s been trying to get away from screens at night, so he pulls out an actual book to read, a tattered paperback copy of _Wolf Hall_ he’s already read twice. Ryan pulls out his phone, scrolls through his socials, and then starts playing one of those puzzle games that seems to involve a lot of pinch-zooming, rotating the phone, and making a lot of confused noises.

It’s domestic. Shane feels _domesticated_. He didn’t have far to go, he’s always been something of a homebody, but this is nice. It’s been a while since he’s regularly fallen asleep next to someone, their warm solid weight almost close enough to touch. He could get used to it.

*

A Tuesday night, about seven pm. They’re sitting on the couch binge-watching Deadwood, which Shane’s seen five times all the way through and which Ryan’s somehow never seen. JD’s on the floor playing with her stacking blocks.

 _Cheese_ , Shane thinks, out of nowhere.

It’s the strangest thing. He’s overtaken by an out-of-left field craving for cheese. Not a cheesy dish, just a straight-up piece of cheese. Sharp cheddar, maybe. He’s not even hungry, but he really wants the cheese.

At that exact moment, Ryan extends his leg to poke Shane in the arm with his big toe.

“Hey, go get me a hunk of cheese from the fridge,” Ryan says. “I’m not picky, I know you’ve got like four different kinds in there. Oh, no, wait, I changed my mind. Make it gouda.”

“Get it yourself,” Shane counters. “I’m not your maid, I—”

_dada. papa. cheese._

Shane stops mid-sentence. He sits up very straight, and he becomes aware of Ryan doing the same thing on the other end of the couch. They both turn to stare at JD, and JD’s looking back and forth between them, from Ryan to Shane and back again. Her blocks lie abandoned next to her.

“Shane…” Ryan starts.

_PAPA. DADA. CHEESE._

“Shane. Shane. _Shane_ ,” Ryan says again, with increasing urgency. “I think she…I think she wants cheese.”

“I can hear that. Do you want cheese, bug?” Shane asks her. Hear isn’t quite the right word for it, actually. The information is in his brain, but he never heard a vocalization, never heard the word _cheese_. He simply knew it, like the word bypassed his ears entirely and wormed its way right into his grey matter.

JD stomps her hooves against the floor, looking pleased. Her eyes are intent and bright on Shane’s.

_dada, cheese!_

“Oh my god,” Ryan murmurs. “Oh my god, her first word was cheese. And it wasn’t a word, it was a psychic brain-wave.” 

“Okay, honey, let’s get you some cheese. Next time we say dada, cheese, _please_.”

 _dada cheese please_ , she parrots Shane obediently.

“Holy shit,” Ryan says. He’s off the couch in a hurry, scooping JD up into his arms and following Shane into the kitchen. “She’s talking. Yesterday she just made cute little noises or awful screams and now she’s _talking_. In sentences. Holy shit, I’m losing it.”

“I don’t think it’s talking exactly,” Shane says. “Her vocal chords aren’t built for speech, I guess. But she’s communicating. I don’t understand how it’s possible.” 

Ryan rolls his eyes. “You’re a little marvel, you know that?” he says to JD. “A tiny miracle. Dada doesn’t believe in miracles, only science.”

“Don’t tell her that, man,” Shane says, getting all four of his cheeses out of the fridge to cut JD off a bit of each. “I don’t—I don’t believe in everything, but I obviously believe in her. I can’t explain any of it, but I can see her and hold her and feed her cheese.”

He swoops in with a bite of cheddar, and JD gobbles it up with all eight of her little teeth.

“Yum yum!” Shane says to her, watching her face screw up in delight. “Now say thank you!”

_yum thank you._

“I guess this means we should probably stop dropping f-bombs around her,” Ryan says, sounding a little shell-shocked. “If she’s going to start repeating everything we say. I don’t want TJ to judge my parenting skills the next time he’s here.”

“It’s because of all that time you spent reading to her, you know,” Shane says. “I’m sure all the Jersey Devils are smart and psychic or whatever, but I bet you none of them are smarter than our girl.”

Ryan smiles at that, flushing with pleasure. He feeds JD the last of the gouda and then sets her down so she can hop away, back to her toys.

“It wasn’t a big thing,” he says, looking almost embarrassed at the compliment. “All the baby books said to do it.”

“Yeah, but you read the baby books,” Shane points out. “You threw yourself into it, and now look at her. I can’t take the credit on this one, dude. It took me two weeks just to get my head on straight.”

Shane never thought something that hatched from an egg could be so recognizably intelligent and sweet, so personlike. He’s seen his friends’ babies grow into toddlers and then into young children, and there’s always an identifiable moment where they stop being little baby lumps and turn into tiny people with their own agendas and likes and dislikes. He didn’t know if he’d ever have that with JD, but when he looks at her now he can see a glimmer of what she will grow up to be.

And for Ryan, Shane’s full of a whole complicated mess of things he can’t even begin to untangle. There’s pride there, but also affection and gratitude and a constant, frustrating thrum of attraction. And envy that it seems to come to Ryan so naturally, that he took to parenting like a duck to water, and with none of the existential doubts that plague Shane every second of the day.

It’s almost JD’s bedtime but they keep her up too late, sitting on the floor with her, feeding her new words and then letting her spill those same words back into their brains. It never gets old. Shane understands now why all the new parents on his Facebook are constantly posting about how their babies pooped or made a face or learned a new word. Every single new thing JD accomplishes breaks his brain a little bit.

If Shane were able to post to Facebook about this, he’d be intolerable. The worst of all his friends by far. The whole world would know every single time JD so much as sneezed, if it were up to him.

Ryan pulls out the board books, half of which JD’s chewed the corners off, and they start pointing at random pictures and saying the names of things. They can almost see the neurons firing in JD’s brain as she makes the connections between what things look like and what they’re _called_.

She is smart. Like, scary smart. By the time she goes to bed an hour later she can name absolutely any animal on Old McDonald’s Farm, if they point to a picture of it. She’s also eaten all of the cheese in the house.

In bed that night—still a strange thing, so new Shane boggles just to think it—Ryan puts his phone down.

“I’ve got to say it, dude,” he says. “I was so, so right. Not only are Jersey Devils real, but they are supernatural as fuck. None of that _oh, maybe she’s a forgotten species_ garbage. She’s magic. She can talk in our heads.”

Shane groans. He’s been expecting this for a while, honestly. Ryan’s let him get away with a lot more than he would have, if their positions were reversed. If it were Shane, he’d be gloating all the time, but Ryan has very manfully refrained.

“Fine,” Shane says. He turns over on his side to look at Ryan. “Fine, you win. Ghosts are dumb and stupid and they aren’t real, but whatever she is, yeah, okay. You’re right. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy.”

“Say it again,” Ryan says, and his eyes are dark and mischievous.

“What, the Shakespeare? Because—”

“No, not that part, nerd. The part about me winning. The part about me being right.”

“Oh my god.” Shane rolls his eyes. “Of course you weren’t about to get some culture. I should have known. You, Ryan Steven Bergara, were right about this one thing this one time. Congratulations.”

Ryan’s laughing now, curled in on himself with glee. “ _This one thing this one_ —sure. Kind of a big thing to be right about, Shane. Kind of the major thing we’ve staked our careers on. I should have put money on it, I could be a rich man right now.”

“What with all of this money I have,” Shane says drily. “Just waiting to be won from me in a high-stakes wager.”

“Rich in pizza, then,” Ryan says. “Rich in foot massages. Rich in sexual favors. Ah, what could have been.”

 _It could still be_ , Shane thinks. _You want a massage? You want a blow job? All yours, buddy. You could be drowning in sexual favors, say the word._

“Hell, man, you want a pizza? I’ll order you a pizza right now, if it’ll get you to shut up,” Shane says, because he can’t exactly offer the blow job. The look Ryan gives him is uncomfortably shrewd.

“Yeah, a meat lovers’ pizza,” Ryan says, and then he snickers because he can’t help himself.

“You’re uncouth,” Shane tells him. “I’m going to sleep.”

Ryan’s still snickering when Shane turns his lamp off and rolls over.

*

Ryan’s back in the office the following week, very part time—just to film, really. As far as anybody but TJ, Devon, and now Mark know, he’s been charged with taking care of his sick grandmother, which explains the working from home. TJ, Devon, and Mark are on rotating babysitting duty, staying at the apartment with JD while they film. It’s not an ideal solution, but it’ll let them get the new season of True Crime up.

It’s put Ryan in a good mood, being back in the office and on set. He’s been spending the last five weeks researching and writing and editing scripts in whatever time he could cobble together, between JD’s naps and the hours after Shane gets home from work, sometimes staying up late into the night to take advantage of the quiet. Shane’s been worried about his compounding exhaustion even as he’s been jealous of all the time Ryan gets with JD.

Sitting down to film for the first time in ages feels good. Mark’s with JD today, so TJ’s running camera in addition to the AD job, and he’s got Devon helping with sound.

Ryan’s wearing grey slacks and a black t-shirt that hugs his arms in the tenderest, most loving embrace of fabric Shane’s ever seen. It also has an offensively deep vee. He looks so good it’s distracting. Shane knows Ryan’s about to open his mouth and spew out a horrible tale of grisly murder, and not even that will be enough to totally kill his attraction.

He’s about to be half-mast in his chinos while Ryan tells him about a dismemberment or a murder-suicide or a suspicious drowning, and he’s going to have to make his peace with that.

Compounding that, last night JD said “I love you” for the first time. As they were tucking her in, she’d peeped up at them, her eyes dragging shut with sleep. Then, in their heads: _love you dada love you papa night night._ Shane’s pretty fucked up about it, to be honest, and he senses that Ryan is too. They were uncharacteristically quiet at breakfast, both too solicitous with each other, too careful.

It’s messing with their usual on-screen dynamic. The bantering’s not coming out quite sharp enough. Every quip out of Shane’s mouth sounds too affectionate; Ryan’s eyes are a little too soft. They’ve both been totally infected with love for JD and it’s ruining the playfully adversarial vibe.

“Okay, cut,” TJ says for the tenth time in half as many minutes. “You’ve got to—uh, don’t take this the wrong way, but would it be possible for you to please look less ass-over-tits in love with each other?”

As expected, Ryan jumps straight to indignant. “What the fuck does that mean? We’re not, that’s not, it’s, it’s…we _don’t_.”

“Good job, buddy,” Shane says. “Nailed it.”

Devon peeks her head out from behind the second camera. “It’s like the inside of a warm chocolate chip cookie in here. You just touched Shane’s arm three times in ten seconds.”

Ryan goes red. “I was _hammering home a point_ ,” he says.

“You fixed his hair.”

“It looked stupid!”

TJ raises his eyebrows. “I’m uncomfortable looking at you when you’re like this,” he replies. To Shane he says, “You broke Ryan and I need you to fix him so we can film this episode.”

“Our cryptid baby broke Ryan, and there’s nothing I can do about it because I am also broken now,” Shane says helplessly.

“You’ve got to stop basting each other in warm sticky feelings and find the fucking funny,” TJ orders them. “Find it. Guys. Find it now.”

“Gross metaphor!”

“TJ, it’s not that bad. It’ll be fine,” Devon says. She’s still smiling. Shane’s annoyed about it.

“It _is_ that bad, Dev. We can’t put this on YouTube, it’ll get demonetized in three point four seconds.”

They get going again, and the banter’s going a little bit better. The problem now is the t-shirt. It’s …so tight. It’s really not necessary. Shane’s spending a lot of time contemplating how unnecessarily tight it is. When they get home he’ll have to pull one of Ryan’s shirts out of the laundry and check the tag, to see what size he’s trying to shove his biceps into. Then maybe he’ll take Ryan shopping for some shirts that actually fit him, so Shane can continue to be gainfully employed.

“Cut!” TJ yells again. “Shane. Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Shane asks. He plasters a look on his face that he hopes passes for innocent and pretends he wasn’t staring directly at the space in the vee at the neck of Ryan’s t-shirt where he can almost see a hint of pecs.

“You know what,” TJ says darkly.

It’s true, Shane does know.

“What’s wrong?” Ryan asks, frowning. “I thought that was a pretty good take.”

“It was pretty good,” TJ agrees. “We can’t use it because Shane was staring at your cleavage and panting the whole time.”

“That’s not true!” Shane protests.

“ _Cleavage_ ,” Devon giggles.

Ryan crosses his arms over his chest protectively, which is counterproductive because it only makes all the muscles stand out more.

“I could be home with my daughter right now and instead I’m here with you assholes,” he says. “Can we please get this done?”

Shane takes a deep breath. He tries to remember what it was like working with Ryan before. Back before JD, he was able to look at Ryan and see _just a guy_. Just a nice-looking, gullible guy with a great smile and bad taste in hats. If Shane works very hard, if he pushes the baby out of his mind, if he makes himself forget Ryan’s warm solid _Ryan-ness_ next to him in bed at night, he can almost see that again.

“Okay,” he says, squaring his shoulders. “Let’s get this done!”

*

For her six-week birthday, they take JD to the woods.

It’s the first time they’ve attempted to smuggle her outside, but Shane feels really strongly about it. He’s been hinting at it for weeks now, and for weeks they’ve been having some variation on the same argument when Ryan pushes back.

They have it again.

“It’s not right, Ryan. She’s got hooves, she’s got wings. She’s meant to be outside.”

“She’s safe here. What if we can’t keep her safe out there? If she gets hurt, we can’t exactly take her to a doctor.”

“It’s fucking horrific that she’s never felt wind or sunshine or—any of the other things she’s meant to feel,” Shane argues. “We can’t keep her shut up in here because we’re afraid, dude. You _know_ that isn’t fair to her.”

 Shane feels this way himself, sometimes, when he’s been pent up inside for too many weeks straight, confined by bad weather or lack of free time. He feels trapped, like if he doesn’t go find some nature right away he’s going to wither away and die at his desk. He doesn’t ever want JD to feel like that. He wants her world to be as big as possible, and not limited by a thousand square feet of apartment. 

“Someone could see her,” Ryan says. “They could see her and call the cops, or take a picture and spread it around.”

Shane doesn’t point out that a few months ago it was him and Ryan out in the woods with a camera, trying to catch the Jersey Devil on film and expose it to the world.  They couldn’t have known then what they know now. It would be unkind to say it.

“I know,” Shane says instead. “I’m scared of that too. We’ll have to go somewhere really remote, and keep a harness on her so she can’t get far from us.”

Ryan’s quiet for a long moment, hand running up and down his neck absent-mindedly as he thinks it through. Shane knows he’s got about a dozen very good arguments why they shouldn’t do it—he’s already heard them all—but not a single argument good enough to override Shane’s main argument in favor: it’s what she deserves.

Ryan would rather die, Shane knows, than willingly stand between JD and the best possible version of her life.

“That’s not even the thing I’m most petrified of,” Ryan says finally. He’s looking at the couch, the floor, the ceiling, anywhere but at Shane. “I’m afraid if we take her outside she’ll realize that’s where she belongs, and she won’t be happy inside with us anymore. What if she loves it so much she doesn’t want to come back?”

He looks wilted, sitting there on the couch. Shane wants to touch him, but it’s impossible to say in any given moment whether Ryan will be receptive to physical comfort or actively hostile to it. Usually when he wants it he initiates it, so Shane stays where he is.

“That could happen,” Shane agrees. “I think it’s safe to say that one day it will happen. All kids grow up and leave home, Ryan, and she’s developing much quicker than a human child. But that’s not a good enough reason to not give her what she needs.”

The truth is that they know almost nothing about JD’s species. They don’t know when she’ll be ready to go off on her own, or how they’ll know when she is. It could be weeks or months or years. Every new step she takes, every new word she learns, every day that she looks less like a baby, Shane feels the tension around Ryan wind and tighten another notch or two.

Ryan passes his hand over his face, smooshing his cheeks in silent frustration. Then he nods.

“Yeah, okay. Fine. Let’s take her outside.”

They both take Friday off and get up at the crack of dawn to take JD all the way up to Sequoia National Forest. They’ve decided it’s safer than Los Padres, more remote and more heavily-forested. The longer drive is a risk they’ll have to take.

Getting her there safely is tough. She’s too big for a car seat, with too many limbs and appendages that don’t fit. In the end they coax her into a carrier, the kind you’d use to take a Great Dane to the vet, and they keep a blanket nearby in case they need to cover it in a hurry.

“This is horrible,” Ryan says, peeking back at the carrier in the rearview mirror. He’s driving, and his hands are locked on the wheel so tight that his knuckles are white. “She’s in a crate like a fu—like a dog, Shane.”

 _woof woof_ , JD adds. How she even knows what kind of sound a dog makes, Shane can’t be sure. She seems to know a lot of things they haven’t had the chance to teach her yet.

“Sweetheart, helping or not helping?” Shane says to the backseat. “She’s just joking, Ry. She understands, or she will once she’s under the trees.”

And it’s true—she is joking. They can tell now, kind of, when she’s being sincere and when she’s messing with them. Already they can detect a healthy sense of humor, which might be natural to her or could well be a side-effect of living with Ryan and Shane for six weeks.

“We’ll be there before you know it, _chiquita_ ,” Ryan says, his voice a little pleading. “And I’ll let you have part of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.”

_yum sandwich okay papa._

“Rank bribery,” Shane says, rolling his eyes. “I see who’s the good cop here and who’s the bad cop.” 

They make it to Sequoia in one piece, at about ten in the morning. It’s a weekday and school’s still in session, so the park’s quiet to begin with. It’s not hard to go deeper and deeper into the park, following some route Ryan meticulously researched. When they haven’t seen another soul or car for forty-five minutes, Ryan eases the car into a tiny pull-off.

“Right,” he says, looking visibly nervous. “JD, listen to me, okay? You’ve got to be really quiet. And—I’m so sorry, baby, we’ve got to put this harness and rope on you so you can’t get too far away from us.”

“Ryan, she doesn’t know what a leash means,” Shane reasons. “It’s very sweet that you’re this upset, but she doesn’t know. Kids think sh— _stuff_ like this is a fun game.”

Ryan seems miserable about the whole thing, but JD’s too overwhelmed to even notice the harness and lead. The minute they let her out of the car her eyes go wide. She takes a few cautious hop-steps, getting the feel for the ground under her hooves, so different from wood or carpet.

_dada papa smells noises trees birds dada leaves grass papa_

A series of sensory images flashes through Shane’s head, as quickly as a flip-book: sunlight streaming through trees, falling in dappled patches on the ground and warm on his face. A blade of grass, still wet with dew and cool underfoot. That dank, mossy forest scent, familiar to him but brand-new to her, and coming to him all the stronger through her enhanced sense of smell.

He watches a robin flit through the sky with JD’s fresh eyes, like he’s seeing it for the first time, and he feels the vicarious wonder coursing through him and he knows he was right to insist on this.

Ryan knows it too; he’s looking at JD in shock, like he’s never seen her before, watching her try to communicate her joy to them in an onslaught of images and words and feelings. Shane can tell Ryan’s about fifteen seconds away from losing it, and then he’ll lose it too, and then JD will be confused and upset when she should be having one of the best days of her little life.

“Okay, team, let’s walk,” Shane says. He holds his hand out to Ryan, hoping to ground him, and Ryan takes it immediately. He clutches Shane’s hand tight, like he needs it to stay upright, and with his other he hangs onto JD’s lead.

She hops and scurries ahead of them down the path, eager to get into everything, to touch every new thing she finds. She’s got her wings spread, strong and lean and skeletal, and they flap wildly a few times a minute, like she’s testing the feel of the fresh air against them.

_papa look tree living fluffy?_

She’s tugging at her lead with her tail to get Ryan’s attention, and when she has it she uses the tail to point at a nearby tree.

“Oh, that’s a squirrel,” Ryan says, watching it scamper up the tree and out of sight. “It’s a little—a little furry animal, it lives in trees and it eats nuts and stuff.”

“Good summary,” Shane says. “You know nothing about squirrels, do you?”

_good eat?_

Ryan shoots Shane a pained look. Sometimes JD will ask them something they don’t know how to answer simply because they don’t know what’s supposed to be normal for her, and they don’t want to accidentally pathologize something she needs.

“Some people eat them, but we don’t,” Shane says carefully. “They’re meat, and you don’t usually like meat. Although I admire your chutzpah. Finding out if you can eat it is a great way to approach new discoveries in the world.”

 _chutzpah_ , JD repeats. _chutzpah, chutzpah, chutzpah!_

She bounds on ahead, as far as her lead will let her go, off to the next new thing.

“You were right,” Ryan says. “She needed this.”

“No need to look so sour about it. I know how hard those words are for you to say.”

“I’m trying to say thanks, you asshole,” Ryan says. He squeezes Shane’s hand—he’s _still_ holding Shane’s hand—and Shane doesn’t know what to do about it, other than pray his palm doesn’t get sweaty like a teenager’s.

For lunch they stop near a grassy meadow for a picnic. Shane and Ryan sit on tree roots and put away multiple PB&Js and half a bag of potato chips between them. JD grazes enthusiastically on the freshest grass she’s ever had, stopping every few minutes to chase bugs or to roll around. Every once in a while she hops over to Ryan for a bite of the promised sandwich.

Ryan ties her lead around his ankle. They’re most of the way through lunch when Ryan goes sprawling, like he’s been pulled off balance.

_papa dada wheee look_

“Ouch, what the— _motherfudger_ ,” Ryan non-swear swears, regaining his balance under him. It happens again, a quick yank by the leg, and they both look over to where JD is playing.

She’s not playing.

She’s _flying_.

She can’t go far, Ryan’s weight is holding her down, but she’s hovering a few feet off the ground, flapping her wings wildly to keep her body in the air. Shane can almost feel the push of air generated by her wings, like two big sails moving in tandem. If she weren’t tied to Ryan she might be up and away and gone, and Shane’s stomach churns with fear and surprise.

“Shane,” Ryan whispers, still splayed on his back.

They hadn’t known for sure if she could fly. Shane had wondered if the wings might be for show, or if they were vestigial, left over from a time when JD’s body would have moved differently. Her body’s heavy and strong, nothing birdlike or batlike about it other than the wings themselves, and it seemed to Shane that the wings weren’t big enough in proportion to the rest of her to ever get her off the ground.

But here she is, flying. Not vestigial at all, then; real working wings.

“She’s amazing,” Shane says. His voice comes out hoarse. God, the world is so much bigger than he thought.

He looks at Ryan, and Ryan looks back at him, and neither of them know what to do. Not for the first time on this parenting journey, Shane sees his own expression mirrored on Ryan’s face. What do you say when your kid starts flying? It’s as monumental as their first steps, surely. Shane wants to run to her, but something holds him back.

This feels like it’s hers and hers alone. Like for the first time she’s gone where they can’t follow, and they can only look up at her from the ground. He doesn’t want to interrupt it, her very first time communing with this part of herself. It’s a privilege just to see it happen.

_dada papa see fly!_

He can feel her bliss, the instinctive _rightness_ of it, the longing inside her to take off and fly high and far and fast. She would come back, he knows, but she’s too little to cut loose. They can’t risk it yet.

“We see! You’re doing so good!” he yells up to her instead. He closes his eyes and he can hear her quiet happy noises and Ryan’s breathing next to him, fast and shallow. Shane can’t say for sure which of them needs him more, but it’s probably Ryan.

They watch in silence while she swoops around for a while, no more than eight feet off the ground. Shane can tell that everything in Ryan’s body is screaming at him to reel her back in, to yell at her to come down from there. It’s only sheer force of will, his determination to let her have joy in this thing that comes so naturally to her, that’s preventing him.

Before this, Shane wouldn’t have said Ryan was a particularly strong-willed person. Strong-tempered, sometimes. Strong-opinioned, absolutely. But he’s never seen Ryan work so hard to _not_ do something, to rein himself in.

“Proud of you,” Shane says, nudging at Ryan’s ankle right above where JD’s lead is wrapped around it. The skin there will be red and chafed from the rope, Shane thinks, but Ryan will never complain. Next time Shane will insist on wearing the lead, and he won’t complain either.

“This is excruciating,” Ryan mutters. “She’s—what if she falls?”

“She knows what she can do,” Shane says. “I think she’s a lot more powerful than we know, so let’s see what happens.”

“Why isn’t this as hard for you as it is for me?” Ryan asks. “Mr. I-Need-Evidence over here, suddenly so chill about every batshit crazy thing that happens.”

“I trust her,” Shane says simply. “And I trust you.”

They spend all day in the forest, and after dark they drive home. JD’s curled up fast asleep in the carrier, exhausted by the day’s exertions and the exponential widening of her world. Ryan puts on instrumental music Shane doesn’t recognize, something quiet and contemplative that won’t wake her. If Shane thought kissing him would put a smile on his face, he’d do it.

He might do it anyway.

*

JD starts watching what they watch, and they have to stop watching Deadwood and start watching Disney and Pixar.

Not that this is much of a change, particularly for Ryan, who already watches Disney movies more than most 28-year-old men would care to admit. He comes at it with particular relish now, showing JD all his own favorites.

They watch Coco, and Tangled, and Ratatouille. Frozen they skip for now (“I can’t bear to have Let It Go running through my head every second she’s awake, Ryan, I can’t do it”) and they move on to the classics.

She wants to watch The Hunchback of Notre Dame over and over again, because of the goat sidekick. They’ve showed JD pictures of herself, let her look in mirrors, but it hadn’t even occurred to Shane that she might look at that character and see something of herself there. It’s another surprise, a reminder that she lives in the world even if the world doesn’t know it.

“I guess Sleeping Beauty’s out, then,” he tells Ryan, watching JD watch Hunchback for the tenth time.

“Why’s that?” Ryan asks.

“You know, the d-r-a-g-o-n is a villain,” Shane says. “I don’t want her to see herself in that too, and be upset. Representation matters.”

 _dragon_ , JD says. She doesn’t look up from the movie.

“Oh my god.” Ryan laughs and tousles the fur at her head, between her horns. “If we can’t even spell things around her now, we’re b-o-n-e-d. You’re right, no Sleeping Beauty. Only friendly dragons.”

 _boned_ , JD says, to herself more than anything else. _boned!_

The movies provoke hard questions. Because JD spends most of her life indoors, she doesn’t have a lot of context for the world, except what she sees in movies. The mom thing is a constant undercurrent in the Disney oeuvre—dead moms, absent moms, loving moms, wicked stepmothers—and of course it occurs to JD to ask about it.

They’re watching The Aristocats one day when JD gets their attention. She’s poking at the screen with her tail, leaning in intently to get a better look.

_dada papa where mama?_

On the screen, Duchess the cat is teaching her kittens their scales and their arpeggios. JD’s watching in rapt fascination.

_jd mama?_

Ryan looks at Shane. They should have known this was coming, but they hadn’t, somehow. Shane’s caught completely off-guard and he has no idea what to say.

“You do have a mama,” Shane says carefully. “We don’t know where she is. She gave you to us to take care of, because she couldn’t do it right now.”

_mama love jd?_

Ryan jumps in.

“She loves you so much, little bug. She told us so, she said you were precious to her. I hope one day you’ll get to meet her, because it was very brave of her to send you here.”

Ryan makes a face at Shane, like he’s not entirely happy with the answer, but Shane thinks it’s about as good as could be expected. JD seems satisfied, at any rate, because she nods to herself and goes back to the movie.

Shane shrugs. “Pretty good, I think,” he tells Ryan.

Families come up a lot in the Disney movies, and JD’s obviously curious about that. She’s also curious about love in general, about the different kinds of love and how they’re expressed. It makes things a little uncomfortable for Ryan and Shane, who are perfectly aware that their little family isn’t quite factory standard.

It first comes up when they’re watching The Little Mermaid. It’s not one of Shane’s favorites, so he’s got his laptop out, catching up on email. Ryan’s in the kitchen making dinner, for certain definitions of “making” and also “dinner.” Shane’s trying to ignore the alarming crashing sounds coming from in there.

Ariel and Prince What’s-His-Name are kissing in the boat, serenaded by singing sea creatures, when JD gets his attention.

_dada kissing!_

Shane looks up from his work. “Yeah, bug, they are kissing.”

_love?_

Shane smiles, because that’s a complicated question. It’s especially complicated in the context of The Little Mermaid, but he tries to tamp the cynical part of himself down and resist going into a tirade about how they’ve barely known each other ten minutes. Ryan would probably be better at this one, to be honest. He’s all-in on the Disney-style love-at-first sight romance, a believer in all things.

“Sure, hon. They’re kissing because they love each other. That’s how people show love, sometimes.”

_dada papa love?_

Shane’s surprised at that. He’s sure JD knows they love her; they tell her so all the time. When she wakes up, when she goes to sleep, and plenty in between. They’re not shy with the affection, not with her.

“You know we love you, don’t you? We love you so much.”

But JD’s already shaking her head. She’s got this look on her face that clearly says _duh, dad._ It’s a trip, every single time, to see such a human expression playing out so exactly on inhuman features.

_no! dada love papa?_

Woof. Now there’s a question. Way to hit right where it hurts, kid. Shane wishes she wouldn’t use the psychic powers _quite_ so pointedly.

Shane’s got to be careful here. He’s got to be so, so careful. Whatever is or isn’t going on between Ryan and himself, however their relationship has changed over the last two months, it’s not fair to put JD in the middle of it. It’s hard to help her understand the specifics of their weird co-parenting situation when Shane doesn’t fully understand it himself.

“Of course I love your papa,” he tells JD. He pets her at her shoulder blades, between her wings, so she turns to look at him. “I’ll always love him. It’s just there are different ways to love people.  This way,” he points at the screen, “is a very good way. But there are lots of kinds of love and they’re all great.”

_why dada no kiss papa?_

The hits keep on coming. The truth is that in this moment Shane’s having trouble thinking of reasons why he isn’t kissing Ryan pretty much constantly, except for the obvious one.

“Well,” Shane starts slowly, buying himself a little time. “Well, not everybody wants to be kissed by everybody, not even if they love each other. I don’t think your papa wants to be kissed, and it’s not nice to kiss people who don’t want it.”

JD thinks about that for a minute.

Eventually she renders her verdict: _stupid_. Shane laughs out loud.

“What’s stupid?” Ryan asks. 

Shane turns his head, and Ryan’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He’s wearing an apron, which is something of a joke because Shane’s pretty sure he’s only making spaghetti. He looks cute enough in it that Shane can’t bring himself to make fun.

Shane’s not sure how much Ryan would have heard. They’re not entirely sure of the range of JD’s telepathy yet; sometimes Shane has to be in the room to hear it, or looking right at her, and sometimes he can hear her yelling across the apartment. He doesn’t know if that’s a thing JD herself controls, or whether it’s affected by other factors: how tired she is, how receptive they are, how distracted or focused.

“Love, Ryan,” Shane says. “Love is stupid.”

“Fair enough,” Ryan says. “You’re going to confuse her, though, since you just finished telling her how great it all is.”

Guess that answers that.

“Yeah, she’s full of questions today,” Shane says. He changes the subject, before they can delve any deeper into the question of kissing, and who is or isn’t kissing, and why they aren’t. “Dinner smells really great, thanks for cooking.”

“You say that now. I broke your colander, don’t ask me how.”

Shane thinks that’s that, but he should have known JD was only getting started. She gets this way about things, the way kids do; she fixates, and then she approaches it from multiple angles until she gets the answer she wants. Sometimes Shane has the sneaking suspicion she’s a lot smarter than they are, or at least well on her way.

This time, during Aladdin, right after the big kiss on Jasmine’s balcony, she goes for Ryan. Shane’s got his headphones on, music playing, but because JD’s words go straight to the brain and don’t rely on hearing it doesn’t matter: he can hear her as loud and clear as if he had no headphones on at all. Ryan seems to have forgotten this fact.

_papa?_

Shane pauses his music, but he leaves his headphones on. He’s not trying to snoop, exactly, but he wants to hear.

“Hmm?” Ryan asks. He’s half-watching a Lakers game on his phone. He’d been so excited when they made the playoffs that Shane had been worried he was going to try to stuff JD into a little Lakers jersey with extra holes cut in the back for her wings.

_aladdin kiss jasmine. why no kiss dada?_

Ryan puts his phone down at once. He sighs. Shane tries to make it obvious that he’s not watching and listening, keeping his eyes trained on his laptop screen.

“This again, huh, baby? This is really on your mind lately. Any reason for that?”

 _aladdin kiss jasmine and beast kiss beauty and jane kiss tarzan. why no kiss dada?_ she presses.

Ryan darts a look at Shane, and Shane pretends to be very preoccupied with his screen. He even sort of bobs his head along to a beat that doesn’t exist, so it looks like he’s still caught up in his music. Look, he’s not proud of himself.

“Your dada and I have known each other for a long time,” Ryan says. “Way before you came along. We never kissed before, so we don’t kiss now.”

 _but love dada._ She presents it as a statement, not as a question, and Ryan smiles and rubs his eye. He looks tired.

“Of course, hon. But sometimes when you put someone in one box, it can be hard to take them out of that box and put them in another one. Habits are hard to break. It can be scary. Does that make sense?”

 _no_ , JD says, stubborn. _make new box. put dada in. kiss dada in box._

Ryan cackles, reaching out to pull JD into his lap. She’s so big now, she almost can’t fit there comfortably. She wraps her wings around him like a big wing blanket, like a hug, and he drops a kiss to the top of her head.

“We’ll see,” he says.

Shane doesn’t know what to make of this exchange. Is Ryan being truthful? Is the only thing holding him back really sheer force of habit, or the fear of making a destabilizing change to their lives during a time when JD needs stability? They should probably be talking about this, if only to strategize about how to be on the same page if she keeps asking.

A few days later, JD stops asking and starts ordering.

They’ve just put her to bed in her crib—which has netting over the top now, to prevent her from flying out in the middle of the night—and kissed her goodnight when she points her tail at Ryan, and then at Shane. It comes off as somehow accusatory. Shane feels very put on notice by this two-month-old.

_papa kiss dada goodnight._

“Is that an order?” Ryan says, laughing. “You’re a bossy little thing lately.”

_yes. papa kiss dada goodnight or jd no sleep._

“More like a threat than an order,” Shane jokes. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists, bug.”

_papadadanokissnolovewhypapamyfaultpleasescaredlonelygone_

She’s really working herself into a tizzy about this; she’s only a few seconds away from that horrible cry that will wake up the whole building. Shane knows she’s been curious, that she has lingering questions about his and Ryan’s relationship that can’t be easily explained by the Walt Disney model of romantic love, but he hadn’t realized she was actively upset.

Ryan looks over at him, alarmed. “I didn’t know she was this worked up about it,” he says.

“Well, what are you waiting for, papa?” Shane asks. “Lay one on the big guy so we can all go to sleep.”

Ryan shakes his head, but he’s smiling. He goes up on his toes and presses a brief, chaste kiss to Shane’s lips. They both look over at JD for a verdict.

_bad kiss. no booms._

Booms are, he thinks, fireworks. The Little Mermaid has a lot to answer for.

“No fooling you,” Shane says, but Ryan’s already coming back to try again. This time he really goes for it; he cups the back of Shane’s neck to pull him down and lays a sloppy, open-mouthed, full-on kiss on Shane. There’s a lot to think about, all of a sudden—Ryan’s lips soft under Shane’s, his back strong under Shane’s hands. Shane tries to make the kiss as Disney as he can; firmly PG but still passionate, enough enthusiasm without it being too much. He even gives Ryan a romantic little dip for the full effect, and when Ryan pulls back after a moment he’s laughing.

“Better?” he asks JD, and she nods, looking pleased. Then she yawns, huge and toothy.

_good kiss. not so hard, dumb-dumbs. not so much time. night night._

“I can’t believe that child guilt-tripped us into making out,” Ryan says, shaking his head, as they get ready for bed. “So much for ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists.’”

“Hey, you’re the one who folded like a cheap suit,” Shane points out. “This time it was all you, buddy. You can’t stand having her upset at you for even a second. Never has a person been so wrapped around a kid’s little finger as you are hers, and she doesn’t even _have_ fingers.”

He regrets the _this time_ , a little, although it’s not like either of them have forgotten the last time. Shane will never forget the last time, Ryan’s body so warm and responsive under his own, the sounds he made before Shane made himself pull away.

“ _Dumb-dumbs_ , I swear to god,” Ryan says with a defeated-sounding wheeze as he gets into bed. “We never even stood a chance. She’s been laying this trap for days.”

“I think maybe she just doesn’t want us to be lonely,” Shane says carefully. “You know, after.” He doesn’t want to upset Ryan with the prospect, but it seems to him that JD has been really concerned with them lately, with how they interact independent of herself. Like she’s worried about what she’ll leave behind.

Ryan’s smile fades. He scrubs his hands over his face. “I wondered that too.”

_Not so much time._

*

Three months after JD hatches from an egg in Shane’s living room, they wrap up the season of True Crime and she starts to pull away.

She starts to become frustrated, obviously so, by how imperfectly their human lives are set up for her growing independence. They’ve made the apartment as JD-friendly as possible, but without opposable thumbs there’s only so much she can do on her own.

She spends a lot of time looking out the window, poking her eyes and snout through a slat in the blinds and flapping her wings listlessly. She knows to duck away if a person walks by, but she spends whole afternoons there, sometimes. They let her fly in the apartment whenever she wants, and they try to take her outside every weekend, but it’s not what it should be and they all know it.

She becomes less communicative, rather than more—at least by human standards. For a while she spoke in nearly full sentences, the words arriving fully-formed in their heads, but now it’s mostly flashes of images, swift and complex and full of meaning Shane can’t unravel. It’s as if she’s moved _beyond_ English to something more instinctive to her, something that’s far beyond his and Ryan’s ability to comprehend. He feels like he only grasps a tenth of what she’s trying to show him.

Every night, Shane dreams of flying.

When he wakes up with the memory of wind under webbed wings and visions of the world small beneath him, he turns to Ryan and he sees Ryan looking back at him, sweaty and huge-eyed, and knows he dreamed the same dream.

She’s telling them something, Shane understands, the only way she can now. 

He doesn’t tell Ryan about it, but in the middle of the night, freshly awakened by a particularly vivid dream, he buys a book about grieving the loss of a child off of Amazon. He knows that sending JD off into the next stage of her life won’t be like death, she won’t be _dead_ —but for them, she’ll be gone.

JD starts to pull away from their touch. For her whole life she was cuddly; she craved being touched or stroked. She’d snuggle right up next to them on the floor or the couch. When she was small enough, she’d let them hold her like a baby. Shane remembers the hours and days she spent strapped to Ryan’s bare chest in that sling, her ear tucked up against his heartbeat, and his own heart aches.

Now it’s like her body’s too sensitive to be touched by human hands. A couple of weeks ago her soft fur started to turn coarse and bristly, like it was warning them off. She shies away from their hands now, and urgently presses image after image into their heads if they brush against her with their bare skin: _fire spike hurt pain no_ _sorry sorry sorry_.

Her body and her mind are changing too fast for them to keep up. Shane can’t shake the idea that there are other things, magic things, that her own kind would be teaching her.

Shane knows it’s going to be a fight with Ryan, which is why they haven’t talked about it yet. But with every day that goes by and JD strays little further away from them, Shane feels a little guiltier. They’re delaying the start of her real life for selfish reasons, to delay their own hurt.

 _Tomorrow_ , Shane tells himself every day. _Tomorrow I’ll talk to Ryan._

In the end he doesn’t have to. He comes home from getting groceries one Saturday morning and Ryan’s curled up on the couch, still in his glasses and the soft pants he sleeps in. He’s staring at JD, watching her pace the floor, back and forth, back and forth.

“She’s been doing this since you left,” Ryan says. “Two hours, probably.”

“Yeah?”

Shane sinks down next to him on the couch. Back and forth, back and forth.

Ryan takes a deep breath, and then he lets it out in a shudder.

“I think it’s time to take her home. This is—it’s cruel keeping her here. She’s outgrown us.”

“Yeah,” Shane agrees.

Later they can start to make plans, but for now there’s nothing else to say. He holds his arm out so Ryan can scoot in close and tuck his head into the crook of Shane’s shoulder. They sit together for a long time in silence.

*

Logistically-speaking, it’s not easy to figure out how to make a trip from Los Angeles to New Jersey with a sixty-pound goat-bat-devil creature in tow. They can’t exactly hop on a plane. They can’t stay in a hotel.

Instead they take a week off and they rent a small RV.

Shane’s family used to rent an RV to go camping. He’s never driven one, though. It’s huge compared to his four-door, and as Ryan eases it onto the I-10 it rattles alarmingly, but at least JD can be safe and hidden inside it. At least they can sleep on real beds without having to worry about getting caught.

Ryan’s meticulously researched every stage of the trip. It’s a forty-hour drive to the Pine Barrens; at eight hours of driving a day that’s five days and six nights. On the sixth day they’ll set JD free. On the seventh day they’ll drop off the RV at the dealership in Jersey and fly home alone. He’s got it all figured out, down to where they’ll park and sleep each night.

Shane wishes there was more time to explore. It seems like a waste of a cross-country road trip, to have to keep to such a punishing schedule. He’d like to show JD the whole country from end to end, all the national parks, the complex beauty of it. But there isn’t time, and JD’s no longer receptive the way she would have been a month ago.

By day they take turns driving. The other stays in back with JD, telling her about where they are in the country, reading facts off the Wikipedia entries of states and cities as they drive through them. Ryan finishes reading the seventh Harry Potter book out loud, and after he reads the final line, “All was well,” he disappears into the bathroom for the entire state of Kansas.

Shane starts the trip feeling okay, but the closer they get to the east coast the more the finality of it weighs on him. Three months ago he wanted nothing to do with the strange egg that showed up at Ryan’s door, and now he’d give almost anything to go back and do it all again.

The night they pull into the RV park and campground in New Gretna, New Jersey is one of the unhappiest nights Shane can remember ever having. There are enough beds in the RV to sleep four, so Ryan and Shane could have their own beds the whole trip if they’d wanted, but by unspoken agreement they’ve been sharing the master bed at the back anyway.

That last night Ryan shivers himself to sleep, like he’s got a fever, until Shane pulls him close and holds him tight to stop the shaking.

*

The next morning dawns hot and muggy. It’ll be threatening to crack ninety later.

To his surprise, Ryan wakes up in an okay mood, much calmer than he’s been. Shane can see the fight face on him from the minute he opens his eyes. Shane recognizes the grim concentration on Ryan from shoots, when he’s determined not to let the fear win even when he’s nearly delirious with it.

They eat breakfast together in the back of the RV, just cereal and fruit and more coffee than either of them would normally consume. JD’s more interactive than usual, more like she used to be, as if she can tell they’re out of time. She stays near one or the other of them all morning, following and watching as they putter around and put off the inevitable.

Finally they can’t put it off any longer. They pack some sandwiches and way more beer than two people should drink in an afternoon and they drive so far into the Pine Barrens that nobody would find them for hours even if it occurred to someone to look, dozens of miles from any active campgrounds or nature hikes.

“I feel watched, this time,” Shane says a few minutes after they leave the RV. “Do you think they know we’re here? Do you think they know _she’s_ here?”

“Sure do.” Ryan looks around in all directions, and then up to the treetops. “But then I felt watched when we were here to film, too.”

That’s true. He’d said it about ten times filming the Jersey Devil episode, but Ryan comes out with pronouncements like that so frequently on location that Shane’s accustomed to ignoring them. He’d made fun of Ryan for it, in fact, right into the camera, but he’ll take it a little more seriously from now on.

Ryan’s leading them through the trees; Shane doesn’t know where he’s going, but he seems to have a path in mind, or at least he’s walking in the resolute, stompy way that suggests a destination.

Shane starts talking to JD, a low, steady stream of talk to pass the time. Her responses come back in the form of fractured nature imagery, as they always do when they’re outside and she’s distracted.

“This is where you’re from, hon,” he tells her as they walk. “This is where your—uh, your kind, I guess—this is where they live. We’ve come to bring you home.”

At the word _home_ , JD looks over to him. A flash of an image in his head, hazy and dreamlike—his apartment back in L.A. JD on the floor with her blocks, Ryan next to Shane on the couch, Netflix on the TV. A night like dozens they’ve had over the last few months. A memory that isn’t his, but might as well be.

Ryan stops walking.

“Yeah, that _was_ your home, little bug,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. “But before you were there, you were here, just a tiny thing in an egg about this big. This is where your mama’s from.”

He holds his hands about half a foot apart, to show how small she was when she arrived in their lives. 

Shane doesn’t know how to explain the idea of belonging to JD, or if he even needs to. When she’s outside, she seems to understand intuitively the she _belongs_ there, without either of them saying a word, so possibly it’s a concept she’s long-since grasped.

After an hour of walking they arrive at the spot Ryan must have selected for this purpose: the foundation of some old stone building, at least a century old. Looking at the way the forest has grown up around it, at this half-wild and half-manmade place, it feels right to Shane that they should say goodbye here.

“Good choice,” he tells Ryan approvingly. It doesn’t feel good—no place would, for this—but it feels _right_.

“This was a paper mill in the late 1800s,” Ryan says, falling into the habit of narrating the story of the place for Shane’s benefit. “Not a lot of information about it, but it was foreclosed upon a few times before ultimately being destroyed by fire in 1914. There was a little factory town around here somewhere that supported the mill, but those ruins didn’t hold up.”

“It’s beautiful,” Shane says. “And eerie. Real ‘and to dust ye shall return’ vibes.”

“I wanted to pick somewhere we could find again,” Ryan says. “If—in case we—so we can come back, if we want to.”

“Good call,” he tells Ryan, and he smiles to show Ryan he means it. “It’s perfect, Ry.”

“Lunch now?” Ryan asks. “Or after.”

“After,” Shane says. The longer they wait, the worse it will be. Part of him already wants to suggest that maybe they were wrong, maybe JD is fine with them in L.A., maybe this isn’t right for her after all.

But he knows that wouldn’t be true.

Ryan breathes in and out several times, as if he’s meditating. Then he kneels to get to eye-level with JD. She’s had her wings unfurled for an hour, and now they’re quivering with the effort of not taking off. He reaches out to unhook her harness from around her chest, doing his best not to touch her.

Shane knows how badly Ryan must want to touch her.

Ryan looks up at him, and Shane can see the plea in his eyes. He squats down too. Ryan didn’t make him see JD into their world alone, and Shane won’t make Ryan see her out of it alone now.

“Hey, baby,” Ryan says, catching JD’s eye, keeping and holding that increasingly-rare eye contact. Her eyes are dark, unfathomable, out-of-focus pools now, no longer the warm honey-colored goat eyes of her babyhood. Shane wonders about all the things she can see that he never will. “It’s time for you to leave us, if you’re ready. I think you’re ready, right?”

“Thank you for…” Shane can feel himself getting choked up. He swallows hard and tries to tamp it down. High emotions can be stressful for JD, and he doesn’t want her to be stressed. “It was so good, getting to know you for a while. We love you so much, bug.”

“Love you,” Ryan echoes. His hand makes a fist with the effort of not reaching out to stroke her head. “Do you—fuck, I hope you understand.”

JD cocks her head and blinks slowly, catlike. Shane doesn’t always feel like she’s listening these days, but he thinks she is now.

_lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove_

Shane’s almost bowled over with the strength and clarity of it. There’s a rush of intense feeling in his head, almost like a migraine, and then a sudden parade of sights and sounds from JD’s perspective: Ryan reaching out with shaking hands to touch her for the first time. Shane with an eyedropper, looking trepidatious. Devon’s chime of a laugh, sparkling and delighted. A few bars of “God Help the Outcasts” from the Hunchback of Notre Dame soundtrack. Ryan lifting her in a bear hug after she took her first wobbling hops.

“Oh fuck,” Ryan whispers. He stands up and paces to where the stone foundation ends, the heels of his hands shoved against his eyes. Shane looks at JD a moment longer, and then he stands up too.

She’s free, now. Entirely free. There’s no harness on her, no lead: only trees and sky. Shane knows she knows what to do with it.

“I was lucky to be your dad, even if it was just for a little while,” Shane says. “I hope you got everything you needed. We did the best we could.”  

JD reaches out with her tail and winds it around his knee, the closest thing to touch that’s comfortable for her now. Then she pulls away and starts to back up, until she’s back on the dirt path. She starts to sniff around, hesitant, and look this way and that.

Shane sits down cross-legged on the mossy stones to watch her. After a few minutes, Ryan joins him, and they wait.

They don’t have to wait long. She spends about five minutes—well, frolicking, for lack of a better word. The lack of the harness and lead obviously delights her, and Shane wonders, not for the first time, if they should have done this weeks ago. As he’s falling back into another guilt spiral, Ryan grabs for his forearm and digs his fingers in.

“Shane, she’s…”

JD takes off. She flies in a low loop around the foundations of the paper mill, one last farewell, and then she’s up and away and _gone_. It happens without fanfare. Shane’s not sure if he’s expecting a burst of magic, some visible sign that a transfer of this little life has happened, but there’s nothing. He can’t even be sure what direction she flew in.

“Now what?” he asks Ryan, after a few good minutes of silent waiting.

“Now we get fuckin’ tanked,” Ryan says. “I haven’t been drunk in two months. We can’t leave yet, in case she comes back.”

So that’s what they do. They pull out all the beer they brought with them, which is a lot of beer, and they go through it all. They barely talk; they drink, and eat the lunches they packed, and drink some more.

They wait all afternoon and all night, just in case. They have to be sure. They doze off and on against the crumbled walls of the building and get eaten alive by mosquitos, because it didn’t occur to either of them to pack bug spray.

Eventually they can’t stay there anymore. The dark starts to go grey and fuzzy with the approach of the dawn. They’ve got to get the RV to the dealership and themselves to the airport for a noon flight.

That’s okay, though. She’s not coming back.

*

The trip back to Los Angeles is all a blur. Shane doesn’t even really remember getting home, when he looks back on it later. They must return the RV in one piece, because nobody arrests them later. They must fly home, because suddenly they _are_ home, but Shane couldn’t say whether the flight was smooth or what the in-flight movie was or whether there were loud kids on board.

The next thing he knows, he and Ryan are back in his apartment. Devon, TJ, and Mark have been there to look after Obi, as pre-arranged. They’ve also packed up all of JD’s things, her toys and her Pack ‘n Play and everything, and shut them in Shane’s office so he and Ryan don’t have to step in the door and see them first thing.

Shane’s enormously grateful for his village.

“Can I stay here?” Ryan asks. “Not for…just for a while. It’s where we were with her, and I have to be here.”

“Of course you can stay, Ryan.” Shane can’t believe Ryan felt he had to ask. “You can stay as long as you need, man. Stay forever.”

_Please stay._

They shower and settle in with Indian food, but the apartment’s far too quiet. Several times Shane panics— _shit, where is she?_ —before he remembers she’s not here, and that she isn’t supposed to be, and she never will be again.

The tension is unbearable.

Before JD, he and Ryan had a good thing going. They were amiable coworkers, good friends, they had an easy, unforced repartee. After JD arrived they made themselves into something else, because it was what they all needed. But now she’s gone and the fragile _something else_ is still here with them, and Shane’s not sure from what angle to approach it.

“I’m going to head to bed, I think,” Shane says, standing up and stretching. Now he can definitely tell he was on a plane for six hours. “It’s been a long week. You coming?”

Ryan’s head whips up, as if he’d forgotten Shane was even there. Loss has tamped his energy down and sanded all his rough edges smooth.

“I’m going to hang out here for a little while,” he says. “Try to catch up on email or something. I’ll be there in a while.”

Shane tosses and turns for a long time, trying to sleep. Ryan never comes to bed.

*

Shane wakes up dazed and disoriented in the middle of the night. The bed is cold. The bed is cold because it’s a big bed and Ryan’s still not in it.

There’s no law saying they have to share the bed. It’s just that Shane’s sad and lonely and a creature of habit. He checks his phone: 2:35 am. If Ryan’s asleep on the couch he’ll get a terrible crick in his neck, and that’s no good.

Shane gets up to check. He makes it only as far as the hallway when he sees Ryan sitting on the floor next to the closed door of the nursery. The office again, now. At first Shane thinks he’s asleep there, but then Ryan rolls his head up slowly to look at him.

“Oh, hey,” Ryan says, like it’s normal to be sitting in the hallway in the middle of the night, alone. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“I don’t think you tried very hard.”

“I wanted to go in and look at her things,” Ryan says. “You know, closure or whatever. But I couldn’t do it, so I’ve been sitting here.”

“How long have you been sitting here?”

Ryan shrugs, one heavy up-down of his shoulders, almost petulant. “Few hours.”

“Ryan.”

It almost hurts to look at Ryan, at Ryan looking so hurt. Shane feels helpless all over again, almost as bad as new-parent helpless, because this person he loves is crushed and he can’t make it better. Ryan’s never looked more laid bare than he does now, in a ratty old college t-shirt and his pj pants fraying at the hems, chewed up by love and loss and spat back out again.

“Come to bed,” Shane says, and he reaches down to give Ryan a hand and haul him to his feet.

They don’t make it to the bed.

It’s Ryan who kisses him this time. He grabs Shane by the jaw, his fingers gripping firmly at either side of Shane’s face and pulling Shane down and in, stepping back at the same time so his back smacks against the wall of the hallway. He tastes like the curry they had for dinner, all the c-spices: cumin and coriander and cardamom.

“Mmmf,” Shane says, into his mouth.

He should step back. He should say, “Whoa, man, let’s talk about this,” and laugh so Ryan knows he’s not upset. He should go back to bed and make a move another time when everything is less delicate, when and if they’re on their way back to normal again.

He doesn’t want to do any of that. The timing’s bad and they’re both so tender from grief, but he doesn’t care. He’s not even conscious of making the decision; his body makes the choice for him, moving without his permission.

Ryan’s hand is in his hair now, his other clenched at the fabric of Shane’s shirt at his lower back. He’s kissing Shane messily, like he just doesn’t want to be _thinking_ any more.

“Okay, okay,” Shane says, pinning Ryan up against the wall, pressing against him from chest to thighs and bending down to get his mouth on Ryan’s neck, letting teeth graze ungently on warm skin. “You need to get out of your own head.”

“Shane,” Ryan says, shifting under him. He sounds split open, raw and unperformative, and it sends Shane fumbling for the ties at the waist of his pjs without a second thought. Anything to stitch that break back together, even for just a few moments.

He doesn’t know what he’ll find, but Ryan’s hard for him already, shifting up into his hand with exponentially compounding desperation.

“It’s okay,” Shane says, “You’re okay, it’s okay, we’re okay,” when Ryan pulls away to breathe fast and ragged. If Shane says it enough, maybe it will be true.

He pulls back enough to tug Ryan’s pj bottoms around his thighs with one hand and spit in his hand. Ryan groans at the noise, his hips snapping back into frantic motion when Shane gets hold of him again. It’s good now, spit-slick and smooth, his grip tight around Ryan, letting himself get fancy around the head on the upstroke. Shane wants it to be good, if it’s the only—if it’s the last—

Ryan’s gone wriggly and frantic, which isn’t surprising because that’s often his default state when the chips are down. Shane throws a forearm against Ryan’s chest to brace him against the wall. He’s starting to wish he’d flipped on the hallway light to see Ryan’s face better, instead of this otherworldly moonlit version who could almost be a dream.

It would never have happened like this somewhere so mundane as a bedroom. They needed a fuzzy, dark, in-between space for the in-between people they are now. It’s a transition in a place for transitions, and the part of Shane that craves narrative satisfaction appreciates the parallel. 

It’s also one of the hottest things he’s ever experienced, getting Ryan off against the wall of his shitty apartment hallway. It probably shouldn’t be, between their collective sadness and the strangeness of it, but he’s been wanting it so long that the feel of Ryan under him and against him is enough to drown the rest out.

“Come on,” Ryan says, his neck thrown back against the wall, his throat bared like he wouldn’t mind if Shane tore it out. “Jesus. Shane, come on, just—”

“Everyone’s a critic,” Shane says.

If Ryan needs ruthless, Shane can be ruthless. If Ryan thinks he deserves to be punished for something, Shane can deliver it as a kindness.

He bends down to latch onto that vulnerable skin, to suck in a harsh mark they might both regret in the daylight. He tightens his grip, almost too tight, surely too much, but Ryan only gasps in his ear. He pins Ryan’s hip to the wall with his thigh and wrings Ryan’s orgasm out of him by force.

“Fuck,” Ryan spits out. He’s vocal but not particularly verbal, and that’s not a surprise either, considering the noises he makes when he works out. Ryan clenches the fingers of one hand around Shane’s arm across his chest and pounds his other hand against the wall, and that’s the only warning Shane gets before Ryan is coming with a noise that’s half a sigh and half a sob.

Shane works him through it until the fingertips at his forearm are suddenly fingernails, and then he stops to wipe his hand on Ryan’s pajama bottoms and pull them back up over his ass. It’s not particularly dignified, but in Shane’s defense it _is_ two in the morning.

There’s that weird couple of seconds where he’s not sure what to do with himself—walk away or get himself off right here. In the end he waits to see what Ryan will do, the two of them breathing together in the otherwise quiet hallway.

What Ryan does is snuffle, pass the back of his hand over his forehead, and then go back up on his toes to kiss Shane again, softer this time. Then he unceremoniously shoves his hand down Shane’s boxers.

“Sorry if I suck,” he says.

“It’s sweet that you think skill matters to me right now,” Shane says, laughing under his breath. It’s the truth, too. The moment Ryan curls a warm exploring hand around him, Shane’s halfway to gone already. He takes in a long, shaky breath and wishes he had something other than Ryan to lean against.

“Hm,” Ryan says. “This angle’s weird. It’s like jerking off, only not, and—”

“Ryan, I realize you’ve come already, but is now really the time for your ruminations on the geometry of hand jobs?”

“Well excuse me for expressing a natural curiosity,” Ryan says.

“I think you’ve _expressed_ plenty for one night,” Shane says. “Expressed yourself all over my hand, bud. You don’t have to write a thesis about it,” and oh. _Oh_. There it is. Falling back into that familiar back-and-forth rhythm with Ryan feels almost as good as Ryan’s hand on his dick does. He’s been missing this, the last few weeks, while they sulked and processed and mourned. For the first time in ages he sees a path back to normal, or at least to a new normal he can live with.

“Shut up and let me jerk you off,” Ryan says. His hand’s cutting fingerprints into Shane’s side. He hopes it bruises, so they both have marks.

“Literally no one is stopping you but you,” Shane points out. “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Ryan takes the meaningless platitudes as a challenge, as Shane knew he would. The look of intense concentration on his face is adorable, or it would be if Shane could make his eyes focus.

Shane brackets his arms over Ryan’s head, leans his forehead against Ryan’s, and closes his eyes. He has the idea Ryan will feel less self-conscious if Shane’s not watching his face. Sure enough, Ryan’s rhythm gets a little more natural. Shane stifles a moan.

“No, don’t,” Ryan says. “I wanna hear you.”

“You’re so predictable,” Shane jokes, but it comes out weak and flimsy. He wants to banter, but he wants to come more. 

This wouldn’t be enough for him, usually. A lubeless hand job stopped working for him about half a decade ago, but because it’s here and it’s _Ryan_ and he hasn’t bothered to jerk off in two weeks, it works like gangbusters.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he mutters into Ryan’s forehead. Ryan speeds up again, artless but determined, and then Shane is spilling all over Ryan’s hand and his own boxers. Ryan makes a startled sort of noise, but he does his best to not let up.

“Damn, dude,” Ryan says, wiping his hand on Shane’s t-shirt. “Saving it up or something?”

Shane could come back with some stupid line, maybe: _just for you, baby!_ Or _next time it’s on your face_ , but he doesn’t. He just breathes and gathers himself and tries to not immediately shift from pleasure into worry.

“You okay?”

“I mean, I’m covered in jizz, but.”

Shane sighs. He wants to kiss Ryan again, but Ryan seems to be keeping it deliberately light. It makes a nice change from despondent, Shane has to admit.

“Obviously. I mean, are you _okay_?”

Ryan thinks for a moment, and then he yawns.

“Yeah,” he says. “Better. Sleepy. Brain’s quieter.”

And then, because they can’t keep lurking in an empty hallway they’ve both so recently ejaculated in, there’s nothing left to do but clean up and go to bed. Shane tries very hard not to think about the morning, and about the regret he prays won’t find them there. It was probably a mistake, but Shane feels like after the week he’s had, he deserved to do something nice for himself. Nobody can hold a little grief-banging against him, surely.

He’s a little worried Ryan might hold the grief-banging against him.

*

Imagine his surprise, then, when Ryan goes all-in on the grief-banging.

Like, _all in_.

He shouldn’t be surprised; Ryan’s an all-in kind of person. It’s just that Shane hasn’t awakened to a hand on his dick in a very long time, and also Shane didn’t realize Ryan’s all-in nature extended to dicks. One minute he’s having a very nice dream, and the next he’s sliding into wakefulness courtesy of the hand cupping him through his boxers. He’s hard, possibly thanks to the hand or possibly thanks to the very nice dream, who knows, and it takes him several confused moments to put together that it is Ryan’s hand on his dick.

“Ryan, why is your hand on my dick?”

“Dunno,” Ryan says. His voice is thick with sleep. “It was right there.”

“Do you wander through life touching things just because they’re there?” Shane asks, rolling over. “What am I saying, of course you do. I didn’t realize we were there yet.”

“I mean, we raised a child together, sort of,” Ryan points out. “If we’re not there, who is?”

Shane supposes there’s a certain logic in that, if you don’t interrogate it too closely—and he doesn’t intend to.

“I assumed you’d be freaking out,” Shane says, squinting over at him. Without his glasses Ryan’s sort of a blur of skin and a spikier blur of dark hair, even at this close range. “I’m sorry if that was unfair of me.”

Ryan shrugs, rolling over onto his back. “I think I’m feeling too many other things that take priority. Like, who cares about—you know, after everything. I’m tired of worrying about it.”  

What Ryan seems to be implying, but not saying, is: any port in a storm. Right now, anything that feels good is good. They can’t confide in anyone else, can’t seek comfort anywhere else, so they’ll find it in each other. That’s fine. Shane can do that, for a while.

“Right,” Shane says. “Okay, well—”

He doesn’t even get to finish his sentence before Ryan’s rolling back into him, hitching a naked leg around his waist.

“Where did your pants go?” Shane asks. “You were _just_ wearing pants. I’m not mad, I’m impressed.”

“I can put the pants back on,” Ryan offers.

“No, no,” Shane says quickly. “Again, not complaining. Feel free to never wear pants again. I’m baffled by how you slithered out of them without me noticing.”

“Your amateur dicktective skills are atrophying,” Ryan says with a snicker. Shane has half a mind to withhold sex for _dicktective_ , but then who’s he fooling, really? All that really matters is that Ryan is warm against him, hard against him. That Ryan is smiling and laughing, which makes Shane want to smile and laugh. It’s a pleasant change.

He hauls Ryan on top of him. Ryan turns himself into dead weight and snickers again when Shane grunts with the effort. He runs his hands along Ryan’s hips, his spine, the back of his neck, and Ryan goes pliant against him. Their stomachs growl almost in harmony, but breakfast can wait.

*

They spend the next few weeks defiling the apartment, or as Ryan calls it, “making new memories.”

There are ghosts everywhere, for a change—the ghost of JD, the ghost of the family they were. Shane thinks privately that Ryan’s doing a new version of ghost hunting just for them; dowsing the memories out, flicking a flashlight around their murky edges, replacing them with something new. He’s bravely demanding that hidden things show themselves, like he always does.

“Say my name,” he tells Shane, bossy and demanding, his hand flying on Shane’s dick, braced behind him. Shane’s leaning over the counter in the kitchen, pale under fluorescents, feeling only a little bad about the mess he’s about to make in an environment that should ostensibly be clean. “Say—I want to hear you,” Ryan almost pleads. It should be ridiculous, but it isn’t.

“Ryan,” Shane crackles. “Ryan.” His voice comes out hoarse and spluttery—like an entity through the spirit box, except he’s actually saying Ryan’s name, which no spirit’s ever quite managed.

Ryan bites at Shane’s shoulder blade through his shirt, satisfied. “Fucking—yeah,” he says, gripping tighter, almost punishingly so. Shane’s powerless against the onslaught of Ryan’s determination, as ever. Shane inhales sharply and makes a mess.

If Shane were asked to edit a montage of those weeks, it would look something like this:

In the shower before work, both of them running later every second. Shane leaning down so they’re forehead-to-forehead, Ryan’s wet hair plastered to his face, the lather of the soap and shampoo making the slide of their bodies just right. You’d think the height difference would matter, but really it adds a hint of dangerous uncertainty that makes it that much better.

Cut to: Ryan laid out on his stomach on the bed while Shane works him open with long, traitorously unsteady fingers. Half of him still can’t believe this is a thing Ryan might want, that he _does_ want, no matter how many keening, desperate sounds Ryan makes to affirm it. Shane can’t believe how dramatically his life has changed over the last four months. It has him reeling, every single day, between joy and sadness, between deep inner satisfaction and the ache of something missing. It is so much unsteadiness for a steady person.

Cut to: a quiet, thoughtful breakfast together, some Sunday morning they’re not traveling. Ryan’s sleep-wrinkled and sleepy, thumbing through NBA preseason gossip on Reddit, and Shane’s got the travel section of the _Los Angeles Times_ spread out. They never had mornings like this before, no opportunity to settle in against each other and find a natural fit. Shane thinks Ryan might flick a flashlight over it, might upend the quiet by pressing his mouth to Shane’s jaw, his hand to Shane’s lap. But he only grumbles something about LeBron’s ancient knees and lets Shane refill his coffee mug.

There’s abundant grief-banging, but also simply grief. Ryan disappears for long stretches of time into the office. Shane doesn’t go in there, out of respect for the space Ryan has claimed but also because it doesn’t feel like there’s anything in there for him. He goes for long walks in the summer heat instead, until his shirt’s sticking to his back. He knows when he gets back that Ryan will emerge from the office to lick the salt-sweat from his neck, corral him into the shower and make them both forget to be sad for a while. 

And during it all they’re filming for Supernatural again. Ryan’s a consummate professional when they’re on the road. He always winds up in Shane’s bed, his feet tangled up in Shane’s shins, but he keeps his hands to himself. Shane’s sure that TJ and Mark and Devon know or suspect that their relationship has morphed again. They come down for crappy hotel continental breakfasts together now, even when they’re ostensibly booked in separate rooms, and Devon only smiles her gentle, knowing smile and lets Ryan steal bites of her waffle. TJ holds back whatever lecture he might want to give, and when Kate texts him pictures of Silas he doesn’t show the group like he used to.

Filming Supernatural is different too, now that Shane knows it’s not entirely bullshit. There’s no cryptid episode this season, and there probably won’t be another ever again. The fans will complain, but Ryan would never risk it. And while Shane still doesn’t believe in ghosts—he doesn’t, he truly does not—he feels uneasy taunting Ryan about it now. He’d been pretty sure the Jersey Devil wasn’t real, after all, and now he hears Ryan’s voice in his head (“ _other science we don’t know about_ ”) and feels humbled by the newfound bigness of the universe.

Humble wasn’t really his vibe before and the fans will notice, but it can’t be helped. Shane will come up with some excuse, when the time comes.

The heat of summer starts to melt into the promise of fall. There’s a hint of a bite on the air at night every once in a while, as August turns into September. Shane thinks Ryan will settle and start making noise about going back to his own place, but he doesn’t.

He thinks the grief-banging will taper off, but it _doesn’t_.

*

Cut to: Shane on the couch, his legs spread wide, Ryan kneeling between them. PlayStation controllers thrown aside mid-game, abandoned the moment Ryan crawled into his lap and murmured in his ear, _can I, let me_ , because Shane knows a better deal when he hears one.

Ryan was so nervous about this at first. Shane thinks he was in his head about it, trying to overthink the whole thing, overwhelmed by multitasking. It’s muscle memory for him now, like a layup. He runs, he jumps, he shoots, he _scores_. 

Ryan swallows him down with a groan, messy and eager. Almost all of Shane’s brain shuts off—all of it, except some tiny but insistent doubt-filled bit that’s starting to worry that Ryan’s deliberately replacing actual emotional recovery with sex. Shane’s having more and more trouble squelching that bit.

“Ryan,” he hears himself say, not on purpose. “Ryan, we need to talk.”

Ryan pulls off him with an obscene wet _pop_. “We need to talk right now? _Right now_ , Shane? My mouth is kind of occupied.”

“When isn’t it?” Shane asks affectionately. He reaches down with a long arm to run his hand through Ryan’s hair. Ryan mistakes it for a signal to keep going; he bends his head down again to reapply himself to the task at hand, and Shane catches him by the ear to pull his head back up.

“Ow,” Ryan says, a little irritated, and then he sits back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Fine. What’s so important you had to physically remove your dick from my mouth to say it?”

“It’s September,” Shane says. “It’s September and you’re still, uh, here—and we’re still—and this is all still…happening. I’m starting to get concerned about the grief-banging, not that I’m complaining, but.”

“Still here,” Ryan repeats. And then: “Grief-banging?”

“I said you could stay as long as you want, and I meant it,” Shane says hurriedly. “I’m not going to kick you out, I like having you here, obviously. I just—if you’ve got a life to get back to, or…”

He trails off, because Ryan’s making the most horrible face, right at the three-way intersection of furious and upset and gobsmacked. Shane’s said something wrong again, clearly. He tucks himself back in his pants, because it’s not particularly nice when someone’s making _that face_ in near proximity to his dick.                                                  

“Shane, I _live here_ ,” Ryan says. “I’ve got keys and a parking space. My stuff’s in drawers. I pay rent. We’ve had sex on almost every square inch of this apartment. The guys signed a new lease on the house on the first of August and I didn’t re-up with them.”

“Wait, what?”

“I didn’t realize we were grief-banging,” Ryan says, and his voice is short and clipped. He hauls himself up off his knees and drops on the couch next to Shane. “I thought we were just, you know. _Banging_. I thought we—oh, Jesus.” He pulls himself up short and takes a deep, steadying breath. “I thought you were the life I got back to.”

“Oh,” Shane says. He knows it’s woefully insufficient but it’s all he can say, _oh_. He can tell that something big and crucial is happening, or more accurately that something big and crucial happened a while ago and he failed to notice. _Oh no._

Ryan laughs, hollow and humorless. He rubs his face with both hands. “Oh, Christ, I thought we were…I assumed that you dumping me mid-beej was the worst-case scenario, but finding out we were never dating in the first place mid-beej is actually, wow, _so_ much worse.”

Shane thinks back to the last nearly two months since JD left them. He thinks about the sex, but also the quiet mornings and the casual way Ryan would slide into his bed on a shoot and butter his toast for him at breakfast the next morning and brush his teeth next to Shane in the bathroom. It’s possible, he concedes, that they may have been slightly dating. Now that he really thinks about it.

“Oh shit,” Shane says. “ _Fuck_. Ryan, that’s not—nope. No, back up. I need a do-over.” 

“Grief-banging, what is that?” Ryan asks. “Like, you had a lot of sex with me to make me less bummed about our goat-devil kid flying away from us forever? Just gonna fuck the sad out of me and then send me on my way when I’m all whole again?”

“God, no, Ry. I assumed you were coping. I thought you were going through a thing and that nigh-constant orgasms were what you needed. And you spend so much time in the office.”

“ _Going through a thing_. Who says romance is dead?”

“I was going to take whatever you would give me,” Shane says, speaking over Ryan, not making any effort to conceal the desperate creak to his voice. “And be happy with it, and tell myself it was enough.”

Ryan peeks out at him then, from over his fingertips. His eyes are serious but not necessarily angry. He gets up off the couch and for one horrible moment Shane thinks he’s going to leave, walk out the door before they can sort this out and never come back. Instead he disappears down the hallway.

He’s gone for a while, long enough that Shane starts to wonder if he was supposed to follow. When Ryan emerges it’s with a leather-bound book, which he puts on the coffee table with an emphatic thump.

“This is what I was doing in the office,” Ryan says. He opens it. There’s a thumb drive taped to the inside front cover, and the inscription _JD_ , _April–July 2019_. “I wasn’t pining away in there, I was making this. It’s not quite done. I was going to surprise you with it when it was.”

“You took up scrapbooking?” Shane asks.

“Will you just look, asshole?”

It’s JD’s baby book, the one they talked about making months ago. The letter’s glued to the very first page, framed painstakingly by little bits of eggshell broken into pieces and put back together in a new shape with a hot glue gun.

Shane flips through the pages. It’s all there. Dozens of pictures Ryan must have printed himself at home. A lock of fur. The inked impressions of tiny hooves, a tiny tail, a tiny wingspan. Lists of all her firsts, meticulously dated, and her favorite foods and movies and songs and stories. Writing in Ryan’s cramped, hurried hand, pages and pages of it, some of it written straight in the book and some of it jotted down on spare bits of paper and pasted in after the fact.

“Holy shit,” Shane says, flipping through the pages. Every single page holds something precious, and a staggering level of dedication and time. “This is amazing. If I’d known you were…I would have helped.”

“You can help by editing the video footage, you’re better at that than I am,” Ryan says. “But I needed to do it. This was what I was doing to be less sad.”

“You weren’t grief-banging, you were grief-scrapbooking.”

Ryan shrugs, but he also smiles faintly. “Fine. I was grief-scrapbooking.”

“And regular-banging?”

“And regular-banging,” Ryan confirms.

Shane feels the last several months reorient themselves in his mind. Everything shifts a little to the left and wobbles there for a moment, precarious in his memory. Then it all settles into place with a _click_.

He goes back a few pages and lets his finger rest at the edge of a particular photograph, one of his favorites. Ryan’s got JD up on his shoulders, her wings all the way outstretched for balance. She has her snout in his hair and her tail wrapped around his arm. Ryan’s got his head thrown back, laughing at something Shane said right before he took the photo.

It’s from the _before_ time, before they ever kissed, before JD took her first steps, before she was anything more than a secret just for them.

“I loved you then,” Shane says. “And way before that, but I wouldn’t have ever copped to it without her. I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

You can feel the love in the photo, the tender hopefulness with which it was framed and taken. Probably the only reason Ryan’s still here, despite Shane’s monumental stupidity, is that he can feel it too, radiating off the page.

“I wouldn’t have known what to do with it then anyway,” Ryan says. “But now, I don’t know. Weirder things have happened. That egg, that was the weirdest—and then after that, the goalposts for what was weird shifted.”

“Ah yes. _Why not, might as well, not as weird as a baby cryptid_. That’s how every great romance starts.”

“You know that isn’t what I mean.”

“I really don’t,” Shane says. “Or I didn’t. I knew we were different, but I figured that your love for her was sort of confusing things. All those feelings flying around, maybe you got hit with a stray one.”

Ryan clutches his heart and falls over on his side on the couch. “Augh! I’ve been hit!”

They sit on the couch together and page through the baby book together. Sometimes Ryan has to get up and pace, or disappear into the kitchen for a drink of water, just because he can’t watch Shane read something.

_hey sweet girl, tonight you made us laugh until we cried…_

_i’m so frustrated today. you won’t stop wailing. i think we’re doing this all wrong._

_good morning, bug! you knocked over a plant and then ate my entire plate of scrambled eggs while I cleaned it up…_

_having one of those nights where I don’t know why I’m writing. you’ll never read this, you’ll be long gone._

_s—today you wore that shirt I like, the pink one. she fell asleep in your lap after dinner, and i was sure you’d be able to hear my heart beating out of my chest._

_if i have to watch hunchback of notre dame one more time i’m gonna lose my shit._

“This is remarkable, Ryan,” Shane says when he’s gone all the way through it. His fingers are already itching to get going on editing the footage. “It’s got me feeling a certain way. If I may be so bold, I think we should date.”

Ryan barks out a laugh, but his cheeks are pink. “You do, huh. What a brilliant idea. You’re only anywhere from two to four months late, depending on who’s asking.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to be with you, Ryan. Believe me. It’s just that I think someone should have told me I already was.”

“I’m pretty sure our daughter tried to tell you about ten times,” Ryan says. “She was smarter than both of us.”

“She did have the benefit of supernatural psychic abilities, though,” Shane points out. “Whereas we are mere mortal doofuses.”

“I can still move out,” Ryan offers. “If you want to—to go slower. That would be more normal, right? I know none of this is normal, but we can take a few steps back if you want.”

Shane thinks about that. It’s true that they skipped a lot of steps on this weird journey. Most couples don’t start with the kid, after all. Most couples don’t move in together before they have a real first date. But now that they _have_ done those things it feels ludicrous to contemplate going backwards. He’s only known he’s had this for about half an hour, but he’s already very attached to it.

“No, I think you should stay,” Shane says. “Stay forever. Like I said.”

“Yeah, okay, we’ll see,” Ryan says, rolling his eyes. “Sap.”

*

It takes Shane a long time to edit the footage. He can only do it in fits and starts, before it becomes too much for him to handle and he has to go for a long walk. If Ryan was grief-scrapbooking, he’s grief-editing, and every new bit of footage brings it back fresh.

One of the first clips he finds is from that first week, him asleep in the recliner in the office, JD curled up on his chest, Obi on his lap. Ryan’s got the camera and he’s filming from the desk chair.

“I’ve got to be quiet or they’ll wake up,” Ryan whispers. “Shane’s already half an hour late for work. He was up with her so I could go to sleep, so that’s my bad, oops. This is all a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.”

Ryan turns the camera around to focus on his own face.

“Get a load of the bags under these peepers,” he says. “You could store food in these and hibernate for the winter.”

He swivels back around to zoom in on Shane’s face, and then down to JD, and all the way down to Obi, and then a zoom out to capture the whole tableau.

“Cute, right? This whole thing is, uh, pretty wild, obviously. And I’ve—I don’t know—it’s...” Ryan sighs. “I feel weird. Shane’s bed was really comfortable and it’s weird that I know that now. And it’s weird that I’m talking about it on camera.”

Video Shane makes a noise in his sleep then, a rumble like he’s thinking about waking up, and JD shifts and nestles her head into the warmth of his neck. Watching the footage months later, Shane remembers the tiny weight of her, her little snuffling noises, and his heart seizes up at the memory.

“Oh,” Ryan says, almost on an inhale, and his voice comes out strange. He clears his throat. “I should probably put this away, it’s creepy to film people when they’re asleep. I had to…I don’t know. I have a feeling this little nugget’s gonna blow my life up and I thought it would be good to document it. That’s it for now.”

The clip ends.

Shane puts his head down on the desk. He’d been ready for the video of baby JD, but he hadn’t been quite prepared for the soft tiredness of Ryan’s eyes, his face still creased from Shane’s pillow, and the joy beaming through him despite the exhaustion. The astonishing _gameness_ with which he greeted the blowing up of his life.

It’s a miracle, all of it. Even when JD left, she left Shane this undeniable proof of Ryan falling in love with both of them. Shane missed it the first time, in the confusion of his own feelings, but it’s clear as day watching it back.

She left them both so much better than she found them.

He makes a start at editing the footage, but he doesn’t make it very far. Not that first day, and not for many days after. But he keeps plugging away, cutting their time with JD together clip by clip until he has something that tells their story. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it _for_ Ryan specifically until November comes around and he picks up the pace, spending late nights at his computer after Ryan’s gone to bed.

On Ryan’s 29th birthday, a Tuesday, Shane gets up early enough to make blueberry waffles. He ties a ribbon around the flash drive and he leaves it next to Ryan’s plate. Sleepy as he is, Ryan doesn’t notice it until well into his third waffle, when he goes to reach for his glass of orange juice and comes away with the drive instead.

He looks at it for a long moment, nestling the tip of his finger into the ribbon’s curl, then wrapping his whole fist around the flash drive so it disappears from sight entirely.

“It’s done?” he asks Shane, eyes flicking up.

“Just about,” Shane says. “I need your approval for the final cut, though.”

“Tonight,” Ryan says decisively. “I want to look forward to it all day and know it’s waiting for us.”

He digs into his waffle with renewed fervor. There’s something charming about the discrepancy; the maturity with which he’s chosen to delay his enjoyment of Shane’s cut of their footage, and the relish with which he’s shoveling down breakfast like a starving man.

“Just think, a year from now you’ll be thirty,” Shane says, watching with interest as Ryan licks a drip of syrup off his fork and hums his satisfaction. “Practically _ancient_.”

Ryan’s mouth is full, so he flips Shane the bird instead. When he’s done chewing he says, “Yeah, and a year from now you’ll be almost thirty-five, which rounds up to forty, which is basically _dead_. Congratulations, you’re Hugh Hefner and I’m your—”

He starts giggling too much to get out exactly what he is. Shane throws a crumpled, syrup-sticky napkin at him.

“Don’t make promises about little leotards with bunny tails on them that you’re not prepared to keep, Bergara.”

They drive to work together. For a while they didn’t. They’d drive in separately, to make it seem like they were each coming from their respective homes, and then one day Ryan slid into the driver’s seat of Shane’s car without asking and gave him an expectant look until Shane got into the passenger seat and buckled his seatbelt.

That’s Ryan’s MO, Shane realizes now. Ryan will let something ride exactly as long as he feels is right, only until it no longer suits him, and then he’ll simply change it up. He’d slid into Shane’s apartment, and into Shane’s bed, and into Shane’s car. Every time Shane was too timid or too obtuse to ask for more, Ryan gave it freely.

Their coworkers know, of course. They must know, they can’t have missed how Ryan and Shane arrive to work together and leave together. Shane’s never been a PDA guy and Ryan’s too self-conscious to canoodle in the fluorescent openness of the Buzzfeed office, but they’re not taking pains to hide anything.

The lack of prying questions is suspicious, coming from this crowd. Shane wonders if Devon’s sworn everyone to silence about it, upon threat of pain or worse. She’s sweet but protective, small yet mighty, and it seems like something she might do to give them some time to breathe. In the month or so after JD left she was a hovering presence in Shane’s periphery, always ready with a cup of coffee or a sympathetic ear when he needed it.

She’s there now with a birthday card for Ryan, signed by most of the office. Looking over Ryan’s shoulder, Shane can see that TJ’s signed his name with little horns on either side and a little arrow-tip on the tail of the J. Ryan taps his finger on it once, twice, before he smiles his beautiful smile.

The energy’s good all day. Shane can feel Ryan thrumming with anticipation for most of the morning and all afternoon, from the next desk over. Everyone else thinks he’s in a good mood because it’s his birthday; only Shane knows what’s waiting for them at home.

Finally it’s just them again, and two burritos the size of Ryan’s (but not Shane’s) head, sitting on the couch with Shane’s laptop and the thumb drive in front of them.

“I’m weirdly nervous,” Ryan says. “Like, I really want to watch it, but also…”

“You’re worried it’ll make you sad?” Shane asks. He’s a little worried about that. He doesn’t want Ryan’s birthday to devolve into a misery-fest.

“No,” Ryan says. “I think I’m worried it’ll look different than I remember it being. What if my brain has already started, you know, doing what brains do?”

Scrubbing things clean, he means. Making way for new memories, new skills, new bits and bats of miscellany by tidying up old memories and stacking them neatly into lesser-used corners.

“You’re afraid you’re forgetting her?”

That’s something they don’t really tell you about loss. When it’s fresh, everybody says: _time_. Time heals all wounds. Just give it time. And that’s true, in time the pain is duller, but there’s a trade-off. The other side of that coin, the reason it hurts less, is that you’ve begun to forget. It’s natural and normal, the brain’s method of self-defense against the sort of acute pain no person could live with forever, but it’s still true and it comes with its own brand of guilt.

Ryan shrugs. He’s still got that energy around him, fizzy with anticipation and excitement, but it’s tamped down a little now that the footage is right there in front of them, ready to be watched.

“Not forgetting, exactly. The memories are all there. They don’t feel as…pressing, I guess. Almost more like something I dreamed up than something that actually happened.”

Shane knows what Ryan means. The weight of JD in his arms, the gleeful bark of her braying laugh, the mossy smell of that egg, though: those sensory details fade a little more every day, until they’re more like memories of memories.

That’s why they took so much video. It’s what they do. If Shane’s got video record of himself doing a dozen stupid, inconsequential things for the whole internet to see—trying on face masks, belly-dancing, covering himself in spiders, doing wall-balls in a cheerleader outfit—he’s damn well going to make sure he gets to remember _this_.

Shane sticks the thumb drive into the USB port of his laptop and clicks around. It’s a tight thirty-minute edit, the hardest one he ever had to do because every bit of footage felt imperative. He’s proud of the finished result, though. A solid A-plot, a charming B-plot, a nice balance of comedy and pathos.

Ryan watches mostly in silence, bent at the waist, elbows on his knees. Shane thinks if he gets much closer to the computer screen his eyes will cross. He laughs a lot, which is gratifying. One particular sequence—a series of edits of JD chasing Obi through the house, Ryan or Shane hot on JD’s tail, all scored to “Yakety Sax”—has him crying actual tears through his laughter.

“Beautiful,” Ryan says when he calms down. “She was a menace.”

“I don’t think Obi misses her as much as we do.”.

There’s a whole segment that’s just clips of Shane singing to JD, little nonsense songs he made up in the moment. Sometimes he’d change the words of popular songs, sticking her name into them to make them fit.

(“Jersey Devil, you’re the one,” he warbles at her in one clip, upending a cup of sudsy water over her head in the bathtub. “You make bath time lots of fun!”

From behind the camera, Ryan chuckles. “Shane, for fuck’s sake. Don’t let her eat the bubble bath.”

“She’s fine, it’s non-toxic,” Shane says. “You wanna put the camera down and help me? This is a two-man job. Jersey Devil, I’m awfully fond of youuuu!”

“Nah, you’re doin’ great,” Ryan says. He pans to JD, who’s trying to pop bubbles with her horns and doing her very best to prevent Shane from making any progress in getting her cleaned up.

“But it’s your fault she got in the flour in the first place,” Shane protests. He’s got soapy water all down his front and, when Ryan pans the camera over again and zooms, flour in the floofy mess of his hair.

“Because I was trying to make you a birthday cake from scratch! Ungrateful.”)

After the video’s done, Ryan sits back against the back of the couch. He beams over at Shane.

“You did such a good job on it,” he says. “Cut and print. Consider my final approval given.”

“You liked it?” Shane asks.

“I loved it. Best present I ever got.”

“Well, those sneaks you’ve been banging on about lately are waiting for you in the hall closet, just in case,” Shane says, and watches Ryan’s eyes light up anew. 

“I’m so spoiled,” he says from the closet, admiring the sneakers. “Thanks, Hef. Now what do you think, bed? This dick’s not gonna suck _itself_ in celebration of the anniversary of its birth.”

“Gross,” Shane laughs, but he’s already closing his laptop, setting the flash drive aside. They’ll watch the footage again tomorrow, probably, and the next day, and then eventually weekly or monthly, when they need to remember.

It’s been a good night. Shane feels _whole_ again, the way he hasn’t felt in a long time. He feels healed and happy. Looking at Ryan, tracking the broad strength of his shoulders across their living room and basking in the warmth of his grin as Ryan shucks his shirt off and tosses it playfully at Shane’s face, Shane can tell they’re going to be fine.

JD gave them that.

*

Later that night, in bed, nearly asleep, Shane heaves a satisfied sigh and settles himself back against the pillow.

“Hey, Shane?” Ryan asks.

“Hm?”

“Do you remember when we got really toasted, the week Silas was born?”

Shane does remember, albeit blearily. Almost a year ago now they’d gone out to the bar to celebrate the birth of TJ’s son and gotten positively tanked along with most of the Unsolved team, all the way down to the editors and the social media crew. He’d ended the night crammed in a booth with Ryan and Mark, engaged in a sloppy but serious conversation about life before the three of them had called Teej to howl the chorus to “Cat’s in the Cradle” at him on speaker.

“Mostly,” he says.

“Do you remember saying you weren’t sure if you wanted kids or not? That you thought maybe you didn’t?”

They’d all had babies on the brain that night. Ryan had been plainly envious of TJ. He’d talked about being eager to get that part of his life started, about how he’d always wanted to be a dad, and Shane had confessed that he wasn’t sure he could see it for himself.

“Yeah, I remember.”

Shane knows where this is going, and the delicacy of it makes him want to hold his breath. He can’t make himself look at Ryan, because he knows Ryan’s eyes will be very earnest, anxious with the question he’s probably been thinking about for months and nervous to reveal he’s been thinking about it at all.

“Do you…are you still not…?” Ryan starts, and then he stops. He tries again: “What about now, after JD?”

“Well I’m still not wild about the whole unchecked global climate change thing,” Shane says, but it’s not really an answer, and he gets the dig of Ryan’s elbow in his ribs for his trouble.

“Shane.”

“Yeah, I guess I feel differently,” Shane says. “I’m—look, Ryan, it takes me time to be ready for stuff. When you’re ready you know it and you’re there, right? That’s how you operate. But I need…I take time. It took me thirty-two years to adopt a _cat_. It wasn’t that I didn’t want kids, I just couldn’t see it before.”

“But you can see it now?” Ryan presses.

Shane closes his eyes. Doing this again, some day? Not for real, because _this_ was real too, but for keeps _?_ Yeah, he can see it. Ryan was such a good dad. They were pretty good at it together. 

“I can see it now,” he says.

It hovers there in the air between them for a moment, shimmering with promise, and with all the follow-up questions Ryan’s nowhere near ready to ask yet: _when?_ and _how?_ and _with me?_

“Ask me again,” Shane says. “You’ll probably know when, better than I will. You always seem to. If you—when you’re ready to talk about it, we can talk about it.”

That’s good enough for Ryan, who smiles and settles himself on his side, curled up for sleep.

Someday in the future—the not-too-distant future, years but not a handful of them—Ryan will bring it up again. Maybe they’ll still be at Buzzfeed, or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll still be in L.A., or maybe they’ll have moved on. But Ryan will ask, and Shane will say _okay_ , and they’ll give this adventure another shot.

You’re never ready, Shane knows now, until someone comes along who makes you want to be ready.

*

 _Coda_.

In July of 2020, exactly a year after they release JD back into the wilds of the Pine Barrens, Ryan comes up with a reason for them to go back to New Jersey. They film a three-episode stretch of Supernatural episodes—the village of Sleepy Hollow in New York, the Proprietary House in Perth Amboy, and the Imlay Mansion in Allentown—and then they take an extra “travel day” and drop off the grid.

Ryan leads them back out into the wilderness, back to the foundations of the old mill. They’ve left the cameras behind, locked up in the rental SUV.

TJ’s watchful from the moment they step foot under trees. Shane thinks he’s still a little sore about having the wool pulled over his eyes the first time around. Shane knows the feeling. He’s gone over that first shoot over and over, wondering what he missed that Ryan noticed.  

“Anything?” Mark asks Ryan now, and Ryan shrugs.

“It’s hard to say, now that I know for sure something’s here. It might just be that.”

It’s hot as hell itself in the Pine Barrens today. Shane would like to come back when it’s nice out, to see if it might be less eerie in the more generous soft light of autumn. Of all the places to make a yearly pilgrimage, New Jersey in July wouldn’t have been his first choice.

Walking in front of him, Ryan is vibrating with anticipation and excitement. Shane can see it in the tenseness of his shoulders and the way he bounds ahead every few minutes, eventually slowing to let the others catch up. Shane’s worried about that, in case Ryan’s setting himself up for disappointment—Shane doesn’t think they’re going to see anything today. He doesn’t think she’ll be here, or if she is, that she’ll show herself.

“Remember what the note said,” Shane says, not for the first time. “ _We cannot reveal ourselves to humans—I would be exiled_. She’s probably not allowed, Ry.”

Ryan waves his hand dismissively. “Humans with cameras. We’re just some randoms out for an afternoon stroll in the woods. There are sightings all the time.”

“Whatever these creatures are, they’re not stupid, Ryan. They know exactly why we’re here.”

Devon makes a quiet little noise, somewhere between uncertainty and dissent. “You never know, though, Shane. She might come.”

Shane can’t let himself hope for it. There are a thousand reasons why she wouldn’t show herself to them now: maybe she’s not allowed. Maybe she doesn’t remember them. Maybe she’s in her sullen teenager phase, with no time for something so deeply uncool as a family reunion. That prospect makes him smile to himself, and he stores it away for Ryan later.

They reach the ruins of the old paper mill, and he can tell TJ’s impressed by how atmospheric it is. Positively cinematic. Shane can see his fingers flexing, itchy for his camera as he plans exactly what shots he’d get. Mark’s cracking his knuckles, maybe with the same impulse.

Devon hums to herself as she wanders around, dusting pollen off the stones to make a place to set out their lunch. Ryan’s scouring the whole area, eyes up to the treetops, looking for signs they’re not alone.

They eat in near-silence, and when the food’s gone they sit. Shane remembers sitting there and waiting with Ryan a year ago today. What had been a miserable silence then is a comfortable silence now. Whatever happens, it will be fine. This was a long shot anyway, and they knew it when they decided to come out here.

After a while, Ryan snaps his fingers. “Food-motivated,” he says, almost more to himself than to Shane or the others. He roots around in his backpack and comes out with a hunk of cheese and a little bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos.

“Oh, Ryan.”

“Don’t you _oh Ryan_ me,” he says, unwrapping the cheese and shaking the Cheetos out on the stone like an offering and then standing back to admire his handiwork. “If this doesn’t work, nothing will. Don’t you remember how nuts she went for those things?”

Devon laughs. It rings through the clearing, echoing off the stones, and in the near distance a flock of birds flies up and away. If Shane makes himself go very still, if he focuses all his attention outside himself, he thinks he can imagine something _listening_.

“I used to throw them for her to catch mid-air, after she could fly,” Devon says. “I went through bags of ‘em when it was my turn to babysit. I never told you because I thought you’d make me stop.”

“Spoiled,” Shane says, shaking his head. “You try to enact a little order and discipline and everybody goes behind your back to spoil your kid rotten.”

“Order and discipline, is that what you were trying to do?” Ryan asks mildly. “I seem to recall you teaching her to drink Coke through a reusable straw before she even had teeth.”

“Excuse you, it was _caffeine-free Diet Coke_ ,” Shane says.

Ryan eagle-eyes the food offering for a while longer, and then Shane suggests they take a little walk. They leave their packs—there’s nobody around to take them, not for miles and miles—and take a short hike in a loop around the perimeter of the old mill town. TJ preoccupies them for a while by finding the ruin of some other building, the rusted-out remnants of some industrial parts that Shane wants to pick over and marvel at.

When they get back to the mill, the big hunk of cheese and the Cheetos are gone. All that remains is a fine layer of Cheeto dust, a bright fluorescent streak of red that looks ridiculously unnatural against the stone.

“It could have been anything,” TJ says. “A squirrel or a chipmunk or birds. I mean, we are outdoors.” Shane glares at him. Yeah, it could’ve been, but there’s absolutely no harm in letting Ryan think it was JD.

“That was a big piece of cheese for a squirrel or a bird to handle,” Shane says. “And we weren’t gone very long.”

“Yeah, it was her.” Ryan looks pretty certain. His face is relaxed now, smiling, like he’s relieved they didn’t come all this way for nothing. He’s still a believer, and his certainty makes it that much easier for Shane to believe too. He wouldn’t say no to a little _proof_ , is all.

But JD knows that about him, too.

They sit a while longer, but the afternoon’s nearly gone. They’ve got an early flight out of Newark the next morning, and TJ starts making noises about dinner, and it’s time to hit the trail again. Devon’s the first one back to their packs, and when she says, “Hey, what’s…?” Ryan’s head snaps up like he was waiting for it.

Right next to Shane’s pack, resting against the stone foundation, there’s a little square shaped _something_.

“The fuck is that?” TJ asks, but Devon’s already bent down to pick it up. She hands it to Shane without a word.

It’s a wooden block, not quite two inches by two inches square. Only a little paint clings to the wood, but Shane can make out the remains of letters—a chipped red A on one side, the curve of a yellow C on another. It’s a child’s alphabet block, out in the woods for god knows how long; some kids toys have been the same forever.

“It’s a block,” Shane says, passing it along to Ryan. “Like a toy.”

Ryan runs his fingers over the surface of the block, the edges. If it’s been out here since this town existed, it’s in surprisingly good shape, shielded somehow from rot and weather. Or it could be more recent than that, dropped by some hiker or another over the last century.

Either way, it wasn’t there when they dumped their packs a couple of hours ago. It’s a little piece of history just for Shane, and it’s from _her_.

“Told you,” Ryan says, looking smug as all hell, handing it back to Shane. He tucks it into his pack, wrapping it carefully in a spare t-shirt for safekeeping like the gift it was intended to be.

“Thanks, bug,” Shane says, face upturned to the woods. He closes his eyes and lets himself enjoy the dappled heat of the sun on his cheeks for a few seconds, and when he opens them again he sees only spots and floaters and Ryan’s broad, bright grin. “Yeah, Ryan, you did tell me.”

“Add it to the growing list of shit I’m right about,” Ryan says. “Next stop, ghosts!”

“Over my dead body.”

“Hope not, but if that’s what it takes...”

As they start the trek back to the SUV, Shane says a silent goodbye. He doesn’t hear a response, either in his ear or in his head, but he feels it: for the briefest of moments the woods seem to flutter around him, pressing a warm breeze around his long frame like a hug of air.

Ryan’s hand finds his, and they walk on.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Paulie, my dear beta: thanks for making time for this in the midst of illness and other tough stuff, and I apologize for the cracks in your repressed emotions bottle and for increasing your snot output.


End file.
